Experience Sitecore ! | All posts tagged 'Symposium'

Experience Sitecore !

More than 200 articles about the best DXP by Martin Miles

Converting Sitecore back-end developer skills for a rapid kickstart with JSS & Next.js

13. August 2021 Martin Miles (0)
Developers are crucial for Sitecore ecosystem!

With a count of several tens of thousands globally, only less than 15% of Sitecore developers feel confident with modern front-end tools. Resolving this bottleneck is very important as that slows down adoption of new generation of headless approaches: JSS and Next.js. This session is to show the quickest but still effective path for converting typical existing BE skills into the new development paradigm.

I have prepared a session for Symposium 2021 and below is my paper submission proposal. Symposium speech gets backed with a several blog posts and "how-to" videos that highlight the whole path for typical Sitecore developers with minimal knowledge of JS to the state of competency with Next.js

Update: sadly, this proposal was not chosen, leaving me frustrated, as the described topic is very sensitive to the most of us - developers and solution architects. Therefore, I am leaving my submission for historical purposes below.

The proposal

With much already said about the advantages of Next.JS with Jamstack fast delivery by pre-rendering, we won't focus on that as it's well-documented.

Instead, session will mostly cover converting a typical developers' experience from purely back-end skills to the state of confidence enough to start building own Next.js solutions. Outside of it there's almost nothing that describes that the actual learning curve which raise high level of frustration: the gap is too big to fill without knowing a shortcut to success.

The session gets based on my own experience: being such a typical back-end person, I carefully documenting all the way down to the wonderful world of headless Jamstack: necessary steps and traps that may not be obvious for the target audience get explained.

The mission is simplifying switching to a new gen. of development for as much of typical XP developers as possible by:
  • explaining the bare minimum of skills to obtain to be able using Next.js with Sitecore
  • explaining how to set up the necessary toolset, solution, dependencies and the fastest approach for getting the knowledge
  • briefly focusing on container environments being a part of overall experience
  • doing all the above with the minimum efforts possible
  • assuming the audience gets on a self-learning path after overcoming initial "studying gravity" with materials from this session

Speech Agenda

1. JavaScript
  • most important changes since years jQuery ruled the front-end world
  • starting with React: important basis to be used
  • all you need to know about TypeScript using it with Next.js Sitecore solutions
  • unobvious traps of front-end world to avoid

2. JSS
  • mapping the terminology of old dev experience to newer counterparts
  • explaining and troubleshooting GraphQL and layout service
  • JSS Styleguide, DOs and DON'Ts

3. Containers
  • brief introduction for those never had experience containers approach
  • Next.JS starter template
  • development considerations

4. Next.JS
  • understanding pre-rendering options: static generation vs server-side rendering vs incremental static generation
  • managing dynamic content with ISG
  • routing / dynamic routes
  • components rehydration
  • client-side personalization via callback to origin

5. Development Experience
  • understanding solution structure
  • organize CSS on component level
  • debugging and troubleshooting

6. Deployment and Going Live
  • brief architectural overview
  • is self-hosting the best option for your solution?
  • hosting at Vercel
  • Sitecore Experience Edge

7. Demo time covering some of Next.js features:
  • image optimization
  • error handling
  • unusual API routes

8. Conclusion
  • FAQs
  • take-away materials
  • further learning plan


Takeaway materials

By the time of the event, I am going to produce the following materials covering my presentation:

  • A series of blog posts covering a topic much wider
  • GitHub repo with a guidance and codebase from demo
  • A series of short YouTube videos for each use case

Hopefully, once my submission get selected for either SUGCON or next Symposium.

Symposium 2017 and takeaways

24. October 2017 Martin Miles (0)

I've been anticipating that event for so long, and finally, I was there! So let's take a look at what's new have been presented.

Sitecore 9 and xConnect brought a new era of Sitecore development. Starting from principally different installation approach, Sitecore brings multiple changes, the most significant of which are changes developers used to work with xDB (which now moved to SQL Server) and content search (which is now Solr by default). Now instead of calling xDB directly, we will be using xConnect API, which is very well documented, thanks to Martina Welander and her team.

CRM connectors have been announced - for both Dynamics and Salesforce. 

Zenith and Horizon - two Sitecore projects currently in development, but both are very promising. It will change the way we work with the platform, but as for now, there is no way too much information about.

Marketing Automation has been re-worked to the best. Brimit, a Sitecore partner, has arranged a perfect demonstration stand of xConnect and marketing Automation working together on Sitecore 9, identifying contact's (visitor's) parameters from both online and offline channels and assigning them to certain profile pattern card, with sending them personalised email afterwards.

Sitecore Cortex will be a new machine-learning technology to be used along with Sitecore xDB in order to increase personalisation and data analysis. 

I spent decent time talking to guys from the team that builds the core of the platform and Express Upgrade Tool. The last one became a mature intelligent tool allowing do controlled upgrades from almost any recent version of Sitecore to version 9, with identifying all the potential issues and configuration breaking changes. I proud that have suggested few valuable ideas for the product about identifying any customises pipeline changes for the instance.

Technical Preview of JavaScript Services.

Thursday morning Symposium finished, but not for the 250+ lucky to be announced Sitecore MVPs of 2017. We have had 2 more thrilling days of MVP Summit.

Almost everything we have been told or presented there has a "non-disclosure" label, so there's not too much to share. Summit was held at much faster pace, comparing to Symposium itself - longer up to 1 hour long deep presentations, with short 5-10 minutes breaks. We were given a great opportunity to challenge new Sitecore 9 training exam, so that whoever passes that test - becomes Sitecore 9 certified already (as I did!). We also took part in Round Table, where various Sitecore teams were presented at round tables, so MVPs were travelling from one interested table to another, raising questions, suggesting ideas and providing feedback.