SUGCON | Sitecore with Skowronski

I have decided to share with you my impressions from SUGCON 2018 as fast as possible to give as many details as I can about the event.

It was my second time when I had a chance to be on SUGCON and I have to say that this year it was better and bigger than year before. I believe next year it can be only better than the current one so it means that if you will decide to go there you have to be ready for enormous amount of knowledge and huge group of attendees.

Organizers of the SUGCON informed us that in these year almost 600 people have decided to join the event – so next year can be 1000! Community is growing very fast and that is the fact which also was visible during presentations – so great quality of them means that people which had been chosen to conduct presentations were the best experts in the world.

If you were not be able to be in Berlin this year – try to do everything to attend on SUGCON 2019 – date and venue were already announced – London, on 4&5 April 2019 – see you there!

But ok – what actually was so cool this year? Below you will find a list of presentations which I choosed. If you want to know more about what I experienced on SUGCON – just read on.

DAY 1

On first day very important change has been announced. Starting from now every new Sitecore version will be published in line with following assumptions.

After the introduction Jason Wilkerson and Richard Seal told us a story about marketing automation in Sitecoreland – it was very interesting and let understand many people why Sitecore is something more than just and CMS.

After that Kam Figy showed us how JSS & GraphQL can empower frontend layer of Sitecore solutions and how we can use the GraphQL to feed other services with data from Sitecore.

Then Alexei Vershalovich made a great show during his presentation. I had never seen so many Sitecore features working together in so complex example. Marketing automation was looking so easy as never before – I have to try use more of it in the future ( I think that not only me have plan like this).

Then I went to see Rob’s Habraken presentation about GDPR – extremely important thing but not very popular topic in developers community.

Rob shared with us many good tips and starts with really obvious thing – we are developers not a lawyers – we should not be the people who decides what will be implemented – that should be defined by the lawyers and client. Check few slides from his presentation here:

At the end of the day you have to remember that:

That was my last presentation of this day.

Later we were celebrating during Hackathon award ceremony (congrats LasVegans from Poland! – Robert Dębowski, Tomasz Juranek, Wojciech Urban) and MVP award ceremony.

DAY 2

On second day I was waiting for Dmytro’s Shevchenko presentation – last year it was the best presentation on the SUGCON (in my opinion) and this year he presented like continuation of last year presentation. All attendees had a chance to know what is under the hood of xConnect.

Dmytro explained for instance what is the difference between pessimistic and optimistic concurrency control of contact updates

and why we do not have to worry about that too much in Sitecore 9

At the end of presentation he showed the summary which can help you in decision “to upgrade Sitecore or not to upgrade”.

Later I wanted to check what Sitecore Installation Extensions (SIX) will bring for developers. Robert Senktas showed us how easly we can extend Sitecore Installation Framework (SIF) and why we do not have start with extensions from scratch because we have got already an option – SIX which provides many very useful features like installation of SIF prerequisites or installation of older Sitecore versions. Check this here: Sitecore Installation Extensions (SIX).

Next presentation “White hat hacker’s guide to the internet” conducted by Mikkel Romer was very interesting. Even subject of it was so interesting that people were coming to the room with chairs which were taken from other rooms!

Mikkel showed us why we NEVER should not underestimate the value of security. Everything what is in internet can be hacked by bad people and used to do very bad things.

But for me – the biggest value of this presentations is fact that many people had started to think about security and I bet that many of them had decided to check if they used provided by Sitecore recommendations available in security hardening documentation.

After so popular topic I have decided to check something very new to me – “Sitecore & the Blockchain” – I do not sure if I understood all the information which Jason Bert was trying to share with us. Presentation was great and very interesting but I guess I just needed some additional preparation before it.

Then we had a chance to see long chain of presentations.

Kamruz Jaman & Mike Reynolds conducted funny presentation about new Forms module – I would never say that anyone will be able to use Forms with so big smile on the face – but Jammykam and SitecoreJunkie really did that.

Alex Shyba & Adam Weber showed us JSS in action and after that Pieter Brinkman closed the event and announced the time&venue of next year SUGCON.

At the end we all thanked for SUGCON organizers team for great job which they did. Event was great but we are waiting for more in next year – thank you all once more time!

PS. Sorry for the quality of the photos – it was not easy to be closer to the screen 😉

On May I had great opportunity (thank you Coders Center & SoftServe) to took a part in Sitecore User Group Conference in Amsterdam and in this post I will try to explain you why in my opinion it was worth to be there and why I will do everything what possible to be there in 2018.

From the left side: Lukasz Skowronski, Piotr Zadykowicz, Wojciech Urban, Rafal Dolzynski, Robert Debowski, Lukasz Zalewski, Mateusz Wadolowski, Artur Wojno – just a part of our team from Poland.

In general every participant has different impressions. I would say that they can have only good impressions – so do I. Because there was many really great things and it would take too much time to describe all of them, I will tell you what was the best from my point of view.

The Best People

I am starting from people because in my opinion it is the most important to get new contacts and refresh old ones. I had opportunity to talk again with many friends from different countries (greetings for Jason, Una, Tamas) and also get to know well known Sitecore “celebrities” like Kamruz Jaman, Akshay Sura, Robbert Hock and many others. Not too often we have such great opportunity to meet all of them in one place.

The Best Presentations

In these times it is really hard to follow all the things related to Sitecore, sometimes I think that it is even not possible to be up to date with all Sitecore stuff. There is so many new tools, accelerators or just updates done by Sitecore that we need to get knowledge from all possible sources as fast as possible. In my opinion presentations done on SUGCON were so great that they were able to transfer in only 45 minutes knowledge which normally we would gather in few days with reading many available sources.

I will give you an example – during presentation conducted by Dmytro Shevchenko “Sitecore xDB in depth: Harnessing Contacts, Sessions & Clusters” all attendees were able to get to know how exactly work internal mechanisms and locking in xDB. Dmytro gave also many useful advices regarding to work with data from xDB. I am not sure if it is described somewhere in Sitecore documentation but check this photographs:

“Contact lock stages” describes when exactly which data is locked and for how long.

“Concurrency control examples” describes how concurrency in xDB works.

“Scenario 2: Background process” describes how to work with data in the case of contacts import.

You can check Dmytro’s presentation and many others on SUGCON website – here.

The Best Inspiration

Conferences like SUGCON or Sitecore Symposium should not only transfer the knowledge, they should also inspire us to make bigger and greater things and I have to say that I was really inspired with “Robbie – The Sitecore robot”. Check it out here:

Bas Lijten and Rob Habraken did great job and in only 6 months they built real robot which was using Sitecore xDB to store information about “recognized faces” – you have to check that video above – great job Guys!

The Best Party

Let’s be honest – after party everyone can say that his party was the best. Have you ever seen this Heineken commercial:

Yes, the party in the Mirabeau office was similar – trust me. It is also worth to mention that Mirabeau office is also impressive – probably even more than the fridge full of beer 🙂

And they also have their own robot!

The Best Award

Almost the last point on my list – it was great to get the MVP Award!

The Best Experience

Finally, all previous best “things” make in general the best experience I have had in last few months and definitely I want to be on SUGCON in 2018 – hopefully you will be there as well.

Tag: SUGCON

Recap of SUGCON 2018 – Berlin