Career Break & Women in Technology - The Big Issue!

I've been asked a question from one of my Blog readers which I could not ignore. The question represents a bigger issue about the social responsibility of organizations and people, in general. Actually, this is not something that affects only women but also the families; you, me and the society . What exactly are we doing about it and is that enough?
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Infinite developers for the price of 3

Question : In a company XYZ Software International, one of the most senior and competent developers was given a task of building a new Team. For whatever reason or to keep the senior members aside for productive work, the manager sets a policy that the most recently recruited developer will conduct the subsequent interview. Assuming that a developer can ascertain only 60% of his own competency, how many developers should be recruited before the team will have an equivalent capability of 3 times the original developer. Consider the worst case scenario. Read more »

ABAP RegEx met CSV and said 'I'll keep a Tab on you'

I wrote about XML processing in my previous posts:

• Discovering a Hidden Gem :Generate Simple Transformation for XML in ABAP
• Generate Simple Transformation for XML in ABAP - Part II

As much as we like to use XML for data-exchange, there are still a lot of legacy(pre-XML) data files floating between the systems. CSV files are used for ages and there are already some functions available in ABAP for the purpose. But all these standard or custom methods of parsing CSV, require more than 10 lines of code.
[ Image and comic from XKCD ]

Arrival of RegEx [ Regular Expressions ] in ABAP should be able to put an end to the miseries, developers have been facing with string ( match/find/replace ) operations. Read more »

Writing Thought-Provoking (Erroneous) Code

Do we learn from our mistakes? Probably not!.According to a research carried out at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology we learn more from our successes than our failures. Except that the research was carried out on Monkeys. Not sure if Monkeys analyse their mistakes as much as we, humans, do. At least programmers do analyse coding mistakes which in turn provokes thoughts and improve their understanding.

I was working on a quick prototype to manipulate the help-values for the status of CRM activities. I wrote following code and encountered an error message stating relation ' ' is still not supported.
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Beneath Abstraction!

Image from Free Stock Photos

Problems cannot be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it. - Albert Einstein

I was trying to find this famous quote from Einstein and realized that like software, it's actually available in many versions. I could not be sure about the original so in the end just chose one of the shortest.

Sometimes the obvious solutions are unable to solve the underlying problems, because from our level of understanding, we could only see the symptoms and not the cause. Just as an example, Socialism and Communism seem to be a very obvious solution to solve the poverty issue. "Collect money from those who have plenty and distribute among others who don't" - seems to be an obvious solution. However, we could all agree, it does not work as expected.

Basically, I am trying to relate this whole stuff of "level", "abstraction" & "consciousness" etc. with "how should we go about understanding basic software concepts and solve software problems". Read more »

Generate Simple Transformation for XML in ABAP - Part II

Just wanted to quickly add some more information to my last post on the same topic "Discovering a Hidden Gem :Generate Simple Transformation for XML in ABAP"

In this example, I will show how to use  "Edit Simple Transformation Graphically" feature of XSLT_TOOL to generate simple transformations for XML elements having attributes.

Let's say there is a requirement to generate XML document from the ABAP data/ internal tables. And the resultant XML document should have the following structure. Basically, POST_CODE should be an attribute of "Town" element. 

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>

<NewDataset>
   <Table>
      <Town POST_CODE="B5">BIRMINGHAM</Town>
      <County>WARWICK</County>
  </Table>
<Table>
      <Town POST_CODE="NP20">NEWPORT</Town>
      <County>WALES</County>
</Table>
</NewDataset>

Initial steps are similar to the example in my last post [ so I've just copied the screen shots from there ] Read more »