I’ll repeat the same overall description we’ve used the past few years as it does an excellent job of capturing the spirit of the event:
Devtoberfest is an attempt to capture the experience of the pre-conference events, like SAP InnoJam of years’ past. It’s an event which kicks off the SAP TechEd season. Devtoberfest takes some of the best aspects of the traditional hackathon type event, such as learning by building something, but opens the experience to the entire community and spreads across multiple weeks to better accommodate everyone’s busy schedules. It’s an event that is also designed for you to be able to participate asynchronously and on your own time schedule. As the idea formed, we’ve seen an opportunity here to really build something that is truly a festival for developers.
Devtoberfest from SAP – An open celebration of what makes us developers – Coding and Collaboration!
Getting Started with Devtoberfest
The home for the event will again be the SAP Community Groups. There is a dedicated SAP Community Group for Devtoberfest and all the individual events will be listed in the SAP Community Events calendar.
This means no more registration on a third-party event site or having to manually link to your SAP Community account. You register for Devtoberfest by reviewing the legal terms and conditions and then just joining the Devtoberfest group.
So you just navigate to the SAP Community Group for Devtoberfest.
Make sure that you are logged into the SAP Community Groups. If not press the silhouette icon in the upper corner.
If this is the first time you have ever logged into the SAP Community Groups, then you will be asked to choose your Groups username.
Once logged into the SAP Community Groups, you can click the Join Group button.
This will automatically link to your SAP Community account and enter you into the Devtoberfest contest.
Here is a video overview of the same steps:
Educational Content
The backbone of Devtoberfest remains the educational content sessions. Devtoberfest is still an event designed for asynchronous consumption. While we will release content every weekday during Devtoberfest, it's all intended that you consume the content on your own schedule.
On that subject here is an example from Devtoberfest 2020. The session in question had forty-four live viewers originally. But over the last three years it's received over thirty thousand views. We want more of the kind of content that you find valuable during the event but can come back to repeatedly over the coming years.This year's theme is making what you learn real for you. We want to share knowledge that you use. Maybe it's something you can use right away on your daily job. Or it's some foundational knowledge that will help you better understand announcements and innovations that will come out of SAP TechEd 2023. There's so much content, it's hard to know where to start sometimes. But with Devtoberfest, we have collected content specifically designed to help people get started and then put that to use.
In 2022 we introduced the format of a topic per weekday, repeated each week of the event. Feedback was overwhelmingly positive for this approach. This year we continue with this approach with only minor changes. We heard that you wanted shorter sessions and more flexibility to spread the learning out. We again have five major topics this year but have combined CAP and ABAP together to make room for Integration topics. We've also added AI to the Data and Analytics day. So, if you are an ABAP or CAP developer, for example, you can return to Devtoberfest every Monday during the event and find content for you.
We will also continue with the color coding of the topics from last year to make it easy to visually identify the topics you are most interested in.
| Monday | 🟢 ABAP & CAP |
| Tuesday | 🟣 SAP Build / Low- and No- Code |
| Wednesday | 🔴 Integration |
| Thursday | 🔵 Data, Analytics & AI |
| Friday | 🟠 Frontend |
All the session content is listed directly in the special Community Events Devtoberfest area. You can see all the sessions in the calendar or list view and drill in and see the content details. As we get closer to the start date in September, we will add connection details such as URLs for joining the sessions or watching the recordings. But even now you can already get an overview of dates and times for all the great educational content to come.
One tip for using the SAP Community Events area: when your profile is created, everyone is automatically set to the US Pacific time zone. We strongly recommend that you go to your SAP Community Settings and change the Preference for the Time zone to your correct value. Then all events in the SAP Community area will be displayed in the correct date and time for your location.
For all the information on the Educational Content, please see this document.
Here is a video overview about picking your sessions:
Getting the Most Out of TechEd
We have TechEd quickly approaching with two days of intensive expert content. But it can be difficult to absorb all the new features and details that come out of TechEd. But you can start preparing for TechEd by participating in Devtoberfest. Devtoberfest will give you the basic introduction to many of these topics which you can then build upon with the deeper and intensive experience that will be TechEd.
If you are planning to participate in hands-on workshops at TechEd, then Devtoberfest is also an excellent opportunity to get setup in trial and free tier environments and perform basic tutorials so that don't waste any setup time on basic steps during TechEd.
Fun Activities
This is a celebration so the Fun Friday activities will return. We saw the greatest amount of participation last year in the activities that didn't require you to show up at a specific time, so we will continue to utilize those kinds of activities this year.
For example, Dogtoberfest was a huge hit in 2021. Last year we expanded the special day for pet parents of all types. Dogtoberfest became Petoberfest! As our pet friends will take over Devtoberfest, we will encourage you to post pictures of your pets of any kind with you in a work, coding, or general office setting. We had some wild posts last year. Can you top it again this year? We will ask that you post these in the SAP Community Groups or in social media with the hash tag: #petoberfest, so the community can easily find all the content.
This is just one of the several fun activities we have planned for Fridays during Devtoberfest. Trivia and gaming events will also return. So, keep an eye on this space for full upcoming details.
For all the information on the Fun Activities, please see this document.
The Contest
Last year saw the introduction of the grand prize of the Winner's Retreat to Newport Beach and Disneyland. It was great fun and hugely successful. Congratulations to all our winners from last year. When something works that well, why change it up; so again this year the grand prize for Devtoberfest will be a similar retreat to the Newport Beach area. But we are also working to provide some backup plans for people that might not be able to acquire travel visas in time.
By popular demand, we will once again have a contest aspect to Devtoberfest. In 2021 we introduced the idea of earning points from a variety of different activities. This expanded the contest to a much greater number of community members. Therefore, this year’s Devtoberfest contest will again use the same basic structure.
It will be a points-based contest. Points are awarded for things like attending one of the educational sessions, completing certain developer tutorials tied to the topic weeks, or other activities that contribute to the SAP Developer Community. Prizes are awarded based upon SAP Community badges which you earn and you must have a public Community profile to participate.
For the listing of activities, points, and other contest details, we will update those closer to the start of Devtoberfest on this page.
But the fun doesn’t end there. We brought back the animated Contest Gameboard to help you track your progress through the contest. Just add your SAP Community Profile ID to the end of the following URL: https://devrel-tools-prod-scn-badges-srv.cfapps.eu10.hana.ondemand.com/devtoberfestContest/scnId.Her...
And if you are curious how we built the animated gameboard, we have also released the whole thing as a Sample Code repository here.
We also have digital prizes that you can win this year. But most exciting, we have a genuinely great grand prize again this year. It's an all-expense paid trip (see details below) to SAP’s Newport Beach office in California to meet with SAP leaders, product experts and an VIP experience at one of area's major tourist destinations. This grand prize includes:- Economy round-trip airfare during event specific dates
- Single Occupancy Hotel Room during event specific dates
- Airport transfer fees to and from major gateway airports during event specific dates
- Meals during event specific dates
- Theme Park ticket, meals, and transportation on specific date
You will need to earn points to qualify for a prize tier and then to be as fair as possible we will perform a random drawing amongst everyone that qualified for that level. And as always be sure to review the legal terms and conditions available in the Devtoberfest SAP Community Group.
For all the information on the Contest, please see this document.
And for all the official rules regarding the contest, please see this document.
And we have a prize FAQ here as well.
Questions, Comments, or Feedback
Questions about the event? Or the judging? Or maybe you have a follow up question after participating in one of the educational enablement sessions? For any question or comment related to Devtoberfest we ask that you please use the dedicated Devtoberfest Discussions board available here.
Good luck to everyone and hope that you all have a blast and learn a lot as well.
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