Tag: experience

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Symposium Summed Up

Just in time for Thanksgiving, I finally got my thoughts all wired about Sitecore symposium this year. It is super hard to sum up the whole experience in one word, but, if I must I have to say it was ‘Marvelous’.

I must say Sitecore and their team really works hard to come up with a theme that connects and has an impact on all of us. While I walked away from Symposium, It was just not the learning, social and happiness for me this time. It was something beyond, it was the Connection I could feel literally. I was very much inspired by the ‘Human Connections in a Digital World’ theme this year. There are always some sessions that align with the theme that are very engaging. This year was no different, some key notes that were the key for goose bump moments on my end were the below

  1. Talk by Platon on Powerful Portraits was so mesmerizing, for a second I forgot that I am in Sitecore symposium. It was not one bit related to Sitecore, but, was much needed to look beyond, answer some questions you would not dare to and understand these personalities we all know from different perspective.
  2. Talk by Dr. Rana el Kaliouby on Emotional Analytics. This was by far my favorite session in terms of keynotes and main stage ones. It is just such an eye opener, it shows that we need to continue to think how to better our amazing systems and technologies we use in our daily lives to add a bit of something that will make the systems think for us and like us. It is simple in terms of logic and almost felt like Yes, we know it and we agree it. But, we are not there yet, kind of surprising. Take away from this is – Emotional AI is not a future thing, we need to act now and remember what makes us US. Would definitely hope Mr. Elon Musk will integrate this Emotion capture in Tesla. 🙂
  3. How can I not mention my two favorite people that I long to see on stage. Jake Johanssen and Sitecore CMO Paige O’Neill. When ever Jake dawns the stage you can hear every one just being happy, he makes us all laugh so much, love him for that and also guess what I could take a picture with him as I bumped in to him. Check us out here ! All smiles. 🙂 Paige is a true inspiration for me, I had an opportunity to meet and greet with her last year at my Symposium talk about Empowering Women. She is an awesome person with amazing stage presence.

Now, coming to break out sessions, I would be unfair to myself if I don’t start with mine lol. So, I will start there. Wow!!! I cant put in words how grateful I actually am to be up on that sparkling stage in-front of so many wise, enthusiastic people. Really feel humbled and proud at the same time to be able to deliver what we planned. You can check more details about my session here. Truly rewarding experience overall!

Below are some of the other sessions I could make it to between practice drills of my own session and other important keynotes. I must say I enjoyed all of them and learned a thing or two. You can now download the session materials for all of the below including mine from connect

  1. Not Impossible: Accessibility for all : This session is a continuation to the keynote by Mick Ebeling , CEO of Not Impossible Labs. His session last year on main stage moved me to tears. This time I was well prepared. 🙂 The co-presenter of this session are Liz Spranzani , SVP, Development , Verndale and Ross Lucivero, Managing Director, LA, Verndale. My two favorite people from my own company. It was very informative session and almost made us all question why do we even produce sites that are not Accessible. If we consider every one of us as equal beings, we should strive to show equality and accommodation on the sites we build as well.
  2. Marketers’ guide to getting started with Sitecore Cortex personalization suggestions : This session was like the most crowded session I attended this time around. People were literally standing and still paying attention. Kudos to Una Verhoeven, Managing Partner, AmpleEdge to get the audience so thrilled and excited about Cortex personalization. Key takeaways from my end were Cortex can be leveraged to provide personalization suggestions and it is important to avoid personal bias. Like anything else, honing is important to ensure personalization acts as expected.
  3. Sitecore AI (MVP Session): I can not give away a whole deal of information since this was MVP only session, but, it was very exciting session that almost got me dreaming in a good way. My next thing for sure.
  4. ‘O Solr mio! : Jeremy Davis totally nailed this one. I was literally looking forward to this one, kind of bummer it was on last day because with Sitecore going SOLR as default option starting 9.0+ it is immensely important we know our options and we know setup for production can be done in a simple and correct way , so we are rest assured on Website Search. 🙂 Love it!!! Very information and as always scripts were released right after the show.

All in all, this symposium was important affair for my personal growth, I walked away stronger, happier and fully satisfied. Best of all, I got to take Sitecore Pillow and Hedgie back home. My daughter owns both right now, but, yeah, glad I could get it back home. I have never been to Chicago, so, really hoping to see how Sitecore rocks it next year.

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24 Hours

24 hours

This has been long due and would like to share my hackathon experience before the memory gets a tad bit weak.  First things first, I must say that I handled the competition with way more ease than first time around.  Who ever said it, yes, it is absolutely correct that “Experience does makes you perfect”

I tried to remind myself and my comrade multiple times that hackathon is only an implementation of scratch of the surface stating the future to explore further.  If you loose this thought, you will find yourself being extremely fatigued and will end up doing bunch of mistakes and miss prerequisites.

The goal is to shoot for stars, but, also, ensure you have a clear picture on what you would call a deliverable.  All in all it was fun and calm for the most part with brain juices flowing pretty well.

You can read about what we did and how we did it – up here.

https://github.com/Sitecore-Hackathon/2018-Witty-Geeks/tree/master/documentation

There is a little video we made as well as a proud participants, but, tired ones. 🙂

Here you go – https://recordings.join.me/H8TFZihidUGXBwppem5_pw

In my next post, I wanted to share my Sitecore 9.1 installation experience with SIF tools and all the pitfalls I bumped in to, luckily there was a blog for most of them.  Of course, I had one unique one which might help some, so, will post that soon.

Cya later!

PS:  If you do not know what hackathon I am talking about, see the details below.

http://www.sitecorehackathon.org/sitecore-hackathon-2018/

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Journey with Helix

Hi There!  With new project I am getting an opportunity to work with Helix patterns, along with leading a team who is awaiting instructions and pointers from me, I am re-inventing and looking at sitecore from a totally different perspective.  Since, the whole sitecore world is moving towards Helix and embracing it, I was bent to take a step forward as well.  I am subtly nervous about this, but, hey, we got a a great team both internally and in community who would pitch in to help us take some decisions.

As I roll along, I plan to share what I learned and how we solved each question/concern that came up while implementing Helix for the first time ever.

Two of them so far.  Below are those noted and steps I took based on recommendations of my fellow super stars.  Do you agree? Do you have some totally different direction that we could lean towards.  I would look forward to getting some different thoughts around this.

  1. Helix does not support base page template and advice to have the page templates inherit from several interface templates instead.
    • Pain point – This would mean, every time there is a need for Global interface template to be added to all page templates, some one has to go to each template and add that in.  Hopefully, if architecture is planned correctly, this should not happen very often, but, yeah, I might have to install powershell for sure to do bulk operations very soon.  I can totally see it.
    • I had no option left at this time other than manually adding couple of those sections that are Global to all templates.
  2. Helix proposes to use a different project per feature/module, but, I guess I agree to use grouping instead to group tightly related siblings(I think you may call it that) in to one project instead.  For example, you have similar looking Hero Slider modules, but, we all know that there is not just one Hero on your website, you will have different flavors for this kind of modules.  So, instead of creating one feature project for each Hero, we tend to group them in to one Feature project instead.  Keeping this balanced, like not abusing it, but, at the same time judging each module case by case basis.
    • In this paradigm, I feel a little confused once in a while especially when Client says any module could be used any where on the site, well technically you could use any module any where on Sitecore, assuming not too many restrictions are placed using placeholder settings, but, saying all modules are Global kind of puts the categorizing in terms of Helix in jeopardy or confused state.
    • What I did to overcome this is – Think about different ways of grouping a module based on name of the module, fields/sitecore items in use for the module, where this module is likely to be used, what is the generic purpose of this module.  Few such questions I answered to myself to give clarity on naming the feature projects.  If the module seems to be really generic and not fitting in to any category, we would then plan to drop it under Modules project.  Again, being careful to not abuse this.

Will definitely bump in to more. Also, cool find, I see that the unit testing feedback provided on Helix/Habitat is pretty cool if you wanna check out

http://helix.sitecore.net/devops/testing/unit-testing.html