CodeJams are cool! Why? Because a lot of different people from different companies of different sizes come together to learn about SAP HANA Cloud Platform. They all are there to learn more, go deeper into the product, understand more, and not worry about asking questions. Really. Because essentially, that is why we organize CodeJams. And also to have fun. And we make sure we do! 
Getting ready...
So this time it wasn't any different for the SAP HANA Cloud Platform CodeJam we held in Palo Alto on June 30, 2016. People from various companies with different HCP expertise came together to enjoy not only the delicious lunch and freshening coffee, but also a whole 6 hours of SAP HANA Cloud Platform coding time!
We had very special guests from Search Your Cloud. CEO Simon Bain (alias "Hacker Simon" as I have learned) blew the audience away when he actually showed us his code and and how his company uses HCP, and why they have chosen this platform over others. Pretty impressive what they have done, check them out here.
Simon Bain CEO of Search Your Cloud talking about their innovative search tool
To quote him:
"The reason why we use HCP is because its simply the best platform out there for us..."
We all agree that there is a wide range of cloud offerings out there, and they all in one way or the other help developers build cloud applications. What perhaps makes SAP HANA Cloud Platform more interesting is its ease-of-use. Within couple of minutes, you can actually have a working application (working across several devices), using SAP Web IDE, leveraging the Cloud Connector to help you access your on-prem environment just to mention some well-known and appreciated features.
An interesting advice Simon gave to the audience was that they first try out their app on a non-production environment to challenge their code. As he explained, what works well there will most probably work on a for production environment as well, at least that is a nice way to test it.
At the end of this CodeJam, we left learning not only about SAP HANA Cloud Platform, but I also shared the news that now anyone can get their free (for production) account on the SAP Store (www.sapstore.com/hcp) which they can update without limitation in 3 months increments and whenever they are ready, they can move to other editions as well, such as the single app edition, which gives them SAP HANA, Enterprise support (cloud edition), SAP Jam, 2GB / user unstructured storage and many more.
Jim Jaquet our HCP expert walked us through how to simply build a mobile web app using SAP Web IDE and deploying to HCP.
And for those that attended, we also handed out 50% off promo codes to the single app editions as a way of us saying thank you for their interest and energy for the day!
It was a really awesome and valuable time for all the participants, big thanks to the HCP experts and helpers that made it happen:
Jim Jaquet, Sonali Desai, Xiaosheng Lu and Dalal Krishna!
Check out upcoming CodeJam dates here: SAP CodeJam events page
Thank you for attending & keep on coding!