02 Dec
Week One with Excursion October 31 – November 4
Winter is slowly setting in, it is now November, which means that we at the SAP Academy have already been working at AGILITA AG for 3 months. The settling-in period is coming to an end and we are slowly but surely getting used to a daily routine at work. But this month was by no means supposed to start on a mundane note. On Thursday and Friday was the Academy trip. Until then, we could use the time to prepare for the trip, but especially to finish the first project of the SAP Academy, the development of a UI5 app. A fine-tuning of such an APP turns out to be much more time-consuming than I expected. An absolute highlight for me were the code reviews with Fabian von Allmen, where we were able to take apart our work of the past month line by line in a comprehensive analysis. You may have a somewhat “stubborn head” after 3-4 hours, but the opportunity to learn from experts more than makes up for it.
The week passed quickly, as we still had more than enough to do. At noon on Thursday the excursion to Ponte-Tresa could begin. Departure from Wallisellen was at 13:09. The excursion was attended by the members of the Academy, Fabian von Allmen. Since Florian Lichtin was unfortunately prevented, we were additionally accompanied by Valentina Knezevic. We had a long way to go, but equipped with some snacks and distracted by exciting conversations, the ride went by quickly. Our connection to Ponte-Tresa required us to walk another 30 minutes to our hotel. However, since it was raining and with the provisions we had bought, this turned out to be rather tedious. Since we then still had to look for the reception and therefore waited in the rain, our mood did not really improve. After a few calls we finally found them and the enjoying could begin.
There was a fine aperitif and pasta alla Genovese, ice cream for dessert. We spent the evening playing games and having interesting conversations. Andrej and I decided to go swimming at about 23:00, since Lake Lugano was actually still about 16 degrees, we finally wanted to enjoy the warmth of Ticino even in November.
Since we wanted to see the sunrise the next morning, the evening also ended relatively quickly, after all, we had to stand on the jetty in front of the hotel at 7:09 a.m. for this.
After a joint breakfast, we were already packing up again. While Fabian von Allmen was still busy, the others decided to stay in Ticino for lunch, as it was raining north of the Alps as it often does in November. But at noon it was unfortunately also time for us to slowly make our way back home. It was two very nice days.
I would also like to take this opportunity to thank AGILITA AG, who provided us with the budget and time, and also Hanna Tonn and Simone Natale, who did much of the planning for the Academy excursion.
Week Two November 7 – 11
In the following week we dedicated ourselves again to our projects, the development of UI5 apps, the goal of this week was to finally finish them, so that we can do another code review next week and then get to know other areas of SAP program development. On Thursday and Friday the Academy had the job of refactoring the AGILITA homepage, migrating blogs from the old to the new homepage and adapting the layout accordingly. After initial difficulties, as this was the first time we had worked on the company homepage, this job developed more and more into a piece of hard work and at least I was relieved when we were able to finish this job on time on Friday.
Week Three November 14 – 18
Finally the time had come: in the week from 14.11. we were allowed to venture into a new topic again. This time the topic is Cloud Application Programming Model. An innovation from SAP that makes developing data services even faster and easier. Especially the completely own scripting language appealed to me, SQL just seems old and dusty in relation. For example, once you have modeled a data model, you can generate UI5 applications directly without much additional effort, which saves additional development time. A great thing. The week went by fast again, besides reading docs and re-writing cap demos we also spent the week doing the last two code reviews together to finally finish UI5 with a good feeling.
Friday this week was another highlight, it was Office Day. This means there is food (this time Weisswürste and pretzels) and at the same time Best Practice Day, which takes place every quarter, in which information is provided about the latest developments in the company. Today, in addition to the introduction of new employees and processing, the focus was on the topic of sustainability and progress with the offices in Berlin.
Week Four November 21 – 25
The last week of November started with a positive surprise. Fabian von Allmen spontaneously decided, in consultation with Thomas Lenzin, to assign the members of the Academy to customer projects for the first time, so that we could look over the shoulders of the more experienced members of the company and, depending on the situation, also carry out one or two assignments. The rest of the week we continued working on our first CAP project.
But we were especially looking forward to Wednesday of this week, as our potential Academy successors came by the company for an assessment day. About 20 applicants visited the Academy and had the task to develop and present a business idea in groups of 5. For this they received some criteria and auxiliary materials and we from the Academy tried to support them actively with questions. Some exciting ideas emerged, which had to be presented to Sandra Völler, Fabian von Allmen, Florian Lichtin, Valentina Knezevic as well as us from the Academy starting at 15:45. Here I had to think back to the same day last year, when I was just as nervous and tense when I tried to convince AGILITA AG of my merits with a similar presentation. I look forward to seeing some of the people I met that day at the AGILITA SAP Academy next year.
The last days of the month we from the Academy spent again with our CAP projects. Along the way, we are also being used more and more in customer projects or for certain practical tasks, a very good development in my opinion.
November was a beautiful month, but unfortunately it passed much too quickly. This is probably also due to the fact that we were very busy this month and were able to experience a lot. I try to enjoy my time at the Academy as long as possible and look to the future with confidence and joy.
Michael Schmid
AGILITA Academy
