
The Open Source Way
A podcast with open source enthusiasts about open source trends, topics and projects.
Latest episodes

Feb 24, 2021 • 37min
Clean ABAP – Best Practices for Effective ABAP Code, Straight from the Expert
In this episode Karsten Hohage talks with our guests Klaus Häuptle and Florian Hoffmann about the importance of having a readable and maintainable codebase to ensure sustainable development. Klaus and Florian started an internal repository with best practices for maintainable and readable ABAP code. Through info sessions with many hundreds of participants, intense discussions, and great contributions, SAP colleagues helped turn this into a treasure trove for modern ABAP’ers. Many developers asked if this would become available as a book, and if they would be allowed to share it with customers and partners. They soon realized that this initiative gained its early drive from its community and needed to remain part of that community. Thus, they opened it to contributions from inside and outside of SAP, hoping that this repository would help developers worldwide to make their ABAP code a little cleaner. In late 2020, they published the book “Clean ABAP” to help individual developers, teams, and entire organizations with learning and implementing clean ABAP.
Guests:
Klaus Häuptle is a software engineer who worked on different products and technologies in the areas of governance, risk, and compliance and supply chain management. During his career he has also been a trainer, coach, and product owner for agile software engineering. Currently, he mainly drives craftsmanship topics across SAP and is a curator for a large internal community with the intention to improve engineering topics by strengthening collaboration.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/klaus-h%C3%A4uptle-951a0349/?originalSubdomain=de
Florian Hoffmann is a team architect and agile driver for SAP Business Integrity Screening, SAP Watch List Screening, and the SAP governance, risk, and compliance solutions, especially the microservice automated procedure. He is also a co-founder of ABAP Clean Code.
Show Notes:
Links
Clean ABAP guide : https://github.com/SAP/styleguides/blob/master/clean-abap/CleanABAP.md
Clean ABAP book: https://www.sap-press.com/clean-abap_5190/
Clean Code Developer Initiative: https://clean-code-developer.com/
code pal for ABAP: https://github.com/SAP/code-pal-for-abap/blob/master/README.md
abap2xlsx: https://github.com/sapmentors/abap2xlsx/blob/master/README.md
abapGit: https://github.com/abapGit/abapGit/blob/master/README.md
abaplint: https://github.com/abaplint/abaplint/blob/master/README.md or https://abaplint.org/
SAP Open Source Program Office
https://developers.sap.com/open-source.html
SAP Open Source Twitter
ospo@sap.com
Additional Downloads:
Download transcript as PDF file.
Hosted by Karsten Hohage – Product Expert in Technology and Innovation (T&I)
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karsten-hohage-0180312/The post Clean ABAP – Best Practices for Effective ABAP Code, Straight from the Expert first appeared on The Open Source Way.

Jan 20, 2021 • 35min
OpenUI5 – A One-Stop-Shop UI Toolkit
In this episode Karsten Hohage talks with our guests Andreas Kunz and Peter Muessig about OpenUI5. OpenUI5 is a JavaScript-based web user interface framework. One that specifically targets enterprise use cases, but can be used for any type of application. Andreas and Peter explain how OpenUI5, SAPUI5, and SAP Fiori are related and how OpenUI5 became an open source project. They elaborate why the modular structure of this probably largest open source project from SAP is an optimal fit for a community approach. Our guests also have some interesting examples how OpenUI5 has been used not only by SAP customers, but also by nuclear scientists as well as completely private individuals building an app for their kids. Overall, OpenUI5 engages a large community of contributors and followers, manifest in five-digit enrollment in online courses and very popular community events.
Guests:
Andreas Kunz works at SAP since 2005 and has been with UI5 from the very beginning in various roles, now as a lead architect. He is always eager to engage with the outside community and an advocate for openness and open source.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreas-kunz-dev/Twitter: https://twitter.com/aku_dev
Peter Muessig works at SAP since 2005 and is an initial member of the Phoenix project (a.k.a. UI5/OpenUI5/SAPUI5), who has grown into the role of a chief development architect for UI5. He mainly focuses on the evolution of the framework, the controls, and the tooling.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peter-muessig-7b40576/Twitter: https://twitter.com/pmuessig
Show Notes:
Links
Website: https://openui5.org/
GitHub: https://github.com/SAP/openui5
Twitter: https://twitter.com/OpenUI5
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOlLpeus2uAJhmxjKHHGTgA
Slack: https://ui5-slack-invite.cfapps.eu10.hana.ondemand.com/
SAP Open Source Program Office
https://developers.sap.com/open-source.html
SAP Open Source Twitter
ospo@sap.com
Additional Downloads:
Download transcript as PDF file.
Hosted by Karsten Hohage – Product Expert in Technology and Innovation (T&I)
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karsten-hohage-0180312/The post OpenUI5 – A One-Stop-Shop UI Toolkit first appeared on The Open Source Way.

Dec 23, 2020 • 38min
Project "Kyma" – An Easy Way to Extend Enterprise Applications
In this episode Karsten Hohage talks with our guests Krasimir Semerdzhiev and Valentin Vieriu about project „Kyma”. Kyma is an open source project built on top of Kubernetes that provides a platform to build extensions for cloud applications. Krasimir and Valentin talk about all the investigations, challenges, and learnings that come with such a project. We learn how and why Kyma got started, where the strange name comes from, and why it is an advantage for contributors that Kyma is based on Kubernetes. The episode also touches how Kyma scales, how it relates to other open source projects inside and outside the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and how you can get involved.
Guests:
Krasimir Semerdzhiev is a true open source enthusiast. He works as a chief architect in the SAP CTO Office where he leads a Northstar Architecture workstream, defining the end-to-end experience for implementation partners and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), who extend and customize SAP products. Having spent the last 20 years in technology development in various roles, he is a prominent evangelist for the adoption of cloud native architecture principles both internally and outside of SAP.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krasimir-semerdzhiev-84044a/Twitter: https://twitter.com/evilyeti
Valentin Vieriu works as a community manager of project „Kyma“. He has been tinkering with the Web for more than 15 years. During this time, he gathered a 360° understanding of how the Web works – from product management via UX, design, and front end, all the way to back end and DevOps. A passionate front end developer at heart, his new goal is to make sure machine learning becomes an easy to use concept for every problem to solve. Whenever you do not find him building web apps or training neural networks, he’s probably strengthening his knowledge about Kubernetes and cloud native application patterns.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/valentinvieriu/Twitter: https://twitter.com/valentinvieriu
Show Notes:
Links
Website: https://kyma-project.io/
GitHub: https://github.com/kyma-project
Twitter: https://twitter.com/kymaproject
openSAP: https://open.sap.com/courses/kyma1
SAP Open Source Program Office
https://developers.sap.com/open-source.html
SAP Open Source Twitter
ospo@sap.com
Additional Downloads:
Download transcript as PDF file.
Hosted by Karsten Hohage – Product Expert in Technology and Innovation (T&I)
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karsten-hohage-0180312/The post Project “Kyma” – An Easy Way to Extend Enterprise Applications first appeared on The Open Source Way.

Dec 9, 2020 • 36min
Project "Gardener" – Managing Kubernetes at Scale
In this episode Karsten Hohage talks with our guests Vasu Chandrasekhara and Tim Usner about project Gardener. Today, Kubernetes is the natural choice for running software in the cloud. More and more developers and corporations are in the process of containerizing their applications, and many of them are adopting Kubernetes for automated deployments of their cloud native workloads. There are many open source tools which help creating and updating single Kubernetes clusters. However, the more clusters you need and the more infrastructures need to be supported, the harder it becomes to operate, monitor, manage, and keep all of them up-to-date. And that is exactly what project Gardener focuses on.Vasu and Tim explain in more detail what Gardener does, why open source is the natural approach to such a project, and how it makes the lives of cloud developers, architects, and operators easier.
Guests:
Tim Usner
Tim Usner joined SAP after studies in information technology. He started his career as a business software developer and later switched to the Gardener project in 2018. Besides his contributions to core components of Gardener, he has advocated the project at different events and supported development teams with their transition to Gardener and Kubernetes. He is passionate about working in the open source space where the project evolves every day, thanks to a growing and contributing community.
LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/timusner/
Vasu Chandrasekhara
Vasu Chandrasekhara studied physics and computer science and started his first job at SAP as a technology consultant. He went back into research in computer science at the European Media Lab. Both experiences set the ground for successfully creating several startups in the following years. He joined SAP again in 2015 as a chief architect in the Central Engineering Team working on cloud native subjects and projects. He initiated the Gardener project, helped to launch the Kyma project, and is otherwise an advocate for open source within the company.
LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/%F0%9F%91%A8%E2%80%8D%F0%9F%8C%BE-vasu-chandrasekhara-b570202/
Show Notes:
Links
Website: https://gardener.cloud/
GitHub: https://github.com/gardener
Slack: https://kubernetes.slack.com/archives/CB57N0BFG
Twitter: https://twitter.com/GardenerProject
SAP Open Source Program Office
https://developers.sap.com/open-source.html
SAP Open Source Twitter
ospo@sap.com
Additional Downloads:
Download transcript as PDF file.
Hosted by Karsten Hohage – Product Expert in Technology and Innovation (T&I)
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karsten-hohage-0180312/The post Project “Gardener” – Managing Kubernetes at Scale first appeared on The Open Source Way.

Nov 25, 2020 • 33min
Outbound Process Made Easy – SAP’s Process and Tooling
In this episode Karsten Hohage talks with our guest Fabienne Haag about the Open Source Outbound Process at SAP and how it was implemented. During the last few years, SAP has been actively initiating and maintaining its own open source projects. Many SAP employees contribute to these projects or to completely different ones. This led to the need to have a simple and transparent process in place. The new Open Source Outbound Process enables developers to easily and quickly start new open source projects and contribute to existing projects – both in a compliant and secure manner. The entire approval workflow is executed in Enterprise GitHub, which is close to the developer community and gives them an easy way to manage their open source contribution requests.
Guest:
Fabienne Haag
Fabienne Haag works at SAP Global Licensing. She is responsible for compliance requirements of the usage of open source components in SAP products. In addition, she is deeply involved in the open source outbound process.
LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/fabienne-haag-597a01173/
Show Notes:
Links
GitHub: https://github.com/SAP
SAP Open Source Program Office
https://developers.sap.com/open-source.html
SAP Open Source Twitter
ospo@sap.com
Additional Downloads:
Download transcript as PDF file.
Hosted by Karsten Hohage – Product Expert in Technology and Innovation (T&I)
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karsten-hohage-0180312/The post Outbound Process Made Easy – SAP’s Process and Tooling first appeared on The Open Source Way.

Nov 11, 2020 • 37min
InnerSource Rocks
In this episode Karsten Hohage talks with our guest Michael Picht about InnerSource at SAP and why it should be the default development model at SAP. InnerSource is the practice of applying methodologies and best practices from open source projects to in-house software development. In an InnerSource approach, projects are open for contributions from other teams. This implies that they accept and build on these contributions – just as an open source project would. The major difference are the boundaries: the community is in-house, it only consists of colleagues, and the codebase cannot be accessed from outside of the company.
By applying InnerSource in an enterprise software development context, you can increase quality, speed, collaboration, and developer joy. Moreover, especially large development organizations can break silos between different teams and encourage developers to expand their skills or use them to support cross-team projects.
If you want to learn more about Open Source at SAP go to: https://developers.sap.com/open-source.html, follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/sapopensource and share your ideas with us: ospo@sap.com
Guest:
Michael Picht
Michael Picht works as a chief architect at SAP. Prior to this, he worked as a developer, software architect, project-, program and product manager within SAP application development with focus on supply chain management, business processes, and innovation topics. At the SAP Open Source Program Office his focus areas are processes, tooling, and InnerSource.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-picht-249b7a149
Show Notes:
Links
SAP Customer Experience: https://www.sap.com/products/crm.html?btp=1602cb35-9270-4588-91b6-972d73f1207b
SAP Open Source Program Office
https://developers.sap.com/open-source.html
SAP Open Source Twitter
ospo@sap.com
Additional Downloads:
Download transcript as PDF file.
Hosted by Karsten Hohage – Product Expert in Technology and Innovation (T&I)
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karsten-hohage-0180312/The post InnerSource Rocks first appeared on The Open Source Way.

Oct 28, 2020 • 39min
Corona-Warn-App: Behind the Scenes
SAP collaborated very closely with the German Government, Robert Koch Institute, Deutsche Telekom, and other partners to develop the Corona-Warn-App in an open source approach. The app warns the users if they have been in close proximity to someone diagnosed with COVID-19. This helps to trace chains of infection and provides guidance to people who have tested positive. The decentralized approach and pseudonymization ensure the highest level of security and data privacy. In this episode, our host Karsten Hohage talks to one of the community managers of the open source project, that was established to develop the Corona-Warn-App. If you want to learn more about The Corona-Warn-App go to: https://www.coronawarn.app/en/ or GitHub: https://github.com/corona-warn-app and share your ideas with us: ospo@sap.com
Guest:
Sebastian Wolf
Sebastian is a development architect and works for the SAP OSPO since the beginning of 2020. He first joined SAP already back in 2003 as a student and has since worked in several development positions such as SAP SRM, ABAP Development Tools, the SAP Community Network and Central Architecture. He was engaged from the very beginning at the Corona-Warn-App project as a community manager.
GitHub: https://github.com/WunderfitzTwitter: https://twitter.com/Ygriega
Show Notes:
Links
Corona-Warn-App: https://www.coronawarn.app/de/
GitHub: https://github.com/corona-warn-app
SAP Open Source Program Office
https://developers.sap.com/open-source.html
SAP Open Source Twitter
ospo@sap.com
Additional Downloads:
Download transcript as PDF file.
Hosted by Karsten Hohage – Product Expert in Technology and Innovation (T&I)
Social Media
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karsten-hohage-0180312/The post Corona-Warn-App: Behind the Scenes first appeared on The Open Source Way.

Oct 9, 2020 • 44min
Open Source at SAP
SAP is the 9th largest commercial contributor to open source projects. Mostly known for proprietary software, almost all of SAP’s solutions touch open source in one way or another. The Open Source Program Office, founded in April 2018, has the mission to nurture and support the open source approach to software development inside and outside of SAP.
Listen to our host Karsten Hohage and our guest Peter Giese why Open Source is important in a global enterprise, why it is a triple win for customers, developers and SAP, and why you need an Open Source Program Office. These and more questions will be answered in this episode. If you want to learn more about Open Source at SAP go to: https://developers.sap.com/open-source.html and share your ideas with us: ospo@sap.com
Guests:
Peter GieseDirector of the SAP Open Source Program Office
Peter focuses on refining SAP’s open source strategy, developing new tools and approaches for managing open source at scale and on further promoting InnerSource at SAP. Since joining SAP in 1996, Peter has held several managerial and executive positions in application and technology development. Before joining SAP, Peter worked as a researcher at Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering (IESE) and as a development manager at Kiefer & Veittinger Software Unternehmensberatung GmbH. Peter holds an M.Sc. degree in computer science from Kaiserslautern University of Technology.
Show Notes:
Links
Corona-Warn-App: https://www.coronawarn.app/de/
Eclipse Foundation: https://www.eclipse.org/org/foundation/
ToDo Group: https://todogroup.org/
GitHub: https://github.com/SAP
Gardener: https://gardener.cloud/
Kyma: https://kyma-project.io/
Open JDK: https://openjdk.java.net/
Luigi: https://luigi-project.io/
Fundamental Library: https://sap.github.io/fundamental/
SAP Open Source Program Office
https://developers.sap.com/open-source.html
ospo@sap.com
Additional Downloads:
Download transcript as PDF file.
Hosted by Karsten Hohage – Product Expert in Technology and Innovation (T&I)
Social Media
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karsten-hohage-0180312/The post Open Source at SAP first appeared on The Open Source Way.