#100: Breaking News, Clouds, Celebration!

Welcome to the Centennial edition of the Boring Enterprise Nerdletter! The big one-oh-oh. We made it! And we could not have made it without you.

Jelena and Paul

[I have officially coined the term “Nerdtennial” below. -Paul]

We interrupt The 100th Nerdletter Extravaganza coverage to bring to your attention some important news that caused quite a stir in SAP world.

1. SAP API Policy Updatepocalypse continues to unravel. Read Jelena’s article for more details about the events and next steps. We also spent quite a bit of time talking about it in our video. DSAG issued their statement on this and more to follow from other user groups for sure.

2. Funny name, not-so-funny effect: Mini Shai-Hulud malware attacks hit the SAP shores. Read this post for more details, including SAP Note information and this article for the press coverage.

We will have more on this as the story develops. Subscribe, subscribe, subscribe! JP

In celebration of Nerdtennial, I had Codex create an archive of all our posts, then generate a lightly tuneable word cloud. Visit the little word cloud app here, where you can filter by author, Nerdletter publishing year, and max number of top terms to put in the cloud. (I think there are a couple of little bugs.) If you click on the term, you get links to the issues where that term is mentioned.

Observations:

• Jelena and I are pretty consistent, both internal to ourselves and with each other. “SAP” is obviously the top term, and for me AI is very clearly the next term (and if you combine “generative” and “model” into that, it would overtake “SAP”). We weren’t immune to the ChatGPT moment: we both (generally speaking) grew our “AI” mentions after 2022.

• We both care deeply about people, developers, and community.

• “BTP” only made the cut into the top 20 one time: Jelena in 2021. This isn’t too surprising - as we noted in our Nerdletter Talk, BTP really hasn’t had an amazing breakout moment. Yes, many customers use the integration suite, but as our show and tell moments with Vadim Klimov demonstrate, I think the interesting bits are not necessarily the BTP bits.

• “Joule” cracked into my top 20 in 2026 - but not in a good way. An interesting sidebar would be to see which times each term is used positively vs negatively. I bet I could one-shot prompt that into the little app.

As much as I like talking about tech, I am most proud that terms like “people”, “community”, “learning”, “experience”, and the like are consistent solid entries. Shockingly, I might even care more about people than about AI. PM

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These days, in every Nerdletter issue you can find at least one meme. But we did not start out as purveyors of the finest enterprise software memery. In fact, no memes appeared in the first two issues and we finally broke ground in #3 with “how about no” bear who was not a fan of documentation.

Over the years, lots of popular memes made an appearance on our digital pages, but only a few made a comeback. Here are the winners of The Most Used Meme award:

1. “Old man yells at cloud” (Paul’s favorite) appeared in issues 9, 21, 37, 60, and 92.

2. “Distracted Boyfriend” made it into issues 24, 32, 43, and 69 , illustrating fleeting interests in SAP space.

3. Futurama fan favorite “Shut up and take my money” showed up in 22, 42, and 99.

While not a meme per se, there is also a clear winner in The Most Used Cultural Reference category: Game of Thrones got a nod a whopping five times in Nerdletter history. And unsurprisingly, the enterprise software developer anthem Office Space came to our minds three times.

My personal favorite remains the conspiracy theory, aka “Pepe Silvia,” meme masterpiece from issue 80. Truly, no other format can better represent the wonderful world of SAP. JP

I think the first time I publicly wrote about anything AI-related in the SAP universe was a how-to from Mindset Consulting on using the Google Cloud Vision API to extract interesting tidbits from images sent through SAP Gateway. I can draw a straight line of continually increasing interest from that to Practical Data Science with SAP (O’Reilly book with my buddy Greg). A couple of years later, our first ever issue…you’ll never guess what I was writing about.

I have lots of non-work thoughts about AI, but in Boring Enterprise Nerds I come back to it time and again because I believe, for most people most of the time, work just plain sucks. And if there’s one way that work can maybe suck less in the future, it’s through applying artificial intelligence to the dumb bullshit most people have to do to pay for food.

Boring Enterprise Nerds is about enterprise software, delivered through the lens of edutainment. We think that learning and sharing about professional stuff is done best when mixed with engaging ways to share our humanity through goofing off.

I sincerely believe in a possible future where fewer people have to work as hard at meaningless toil as do now. I sincerely believe one of the best shots at that is powerful AI. I would like nothing more than for Boring Enterprise Nerds to yield to Boring Bread-baking Nerds, or Boring Knitting Nerds, because there won’t be a need to learn complicated ERP stuff anymore.

But until ChatGPT 9.2 delivers that, we’ll keep Boring you. PM

• Watch the breaking news discussion and celebration kick-off in Nerdletter Talk 100 on our YouTube channel.

• Don’t miss exciting new Show&Tell episode: AI Development Tools with special guest Abesh Bhattacharjee. Like and subscribe!

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