Some exciting things I learned at SUGCON EU 2019
The keynote by Donovan Brown from Microsoft was absolutely fantastic. I’ve been doing a lot of work in the DevOps space and he really delivered a message that I think resonated with everyone in the audience — that a lack of good DevOps practices is a real problem in the industry, and that Microsoft are bringing solutions to this problem in the form of Azure DevOps and their Azure PaaS offering.
The fact that the people at Sitecore are embracing this change head-on shows to me how dedicated they are to be industry leaders and it really makes me feel part of this technology and process driven change in the industry.
A talk from Criss Titschinger on his learnings of a year in PaaS (slides available here) really surprised me. Not from what Criss had to say, but from the audience’s reactions to the insights he was giving. Everyone was so tuned-in, taking photos of every slide, and then there was a great Q&A session at the end that really highlighted what usergroups are about — sharing information.
Upcoming and new releases
Sitecore’s Pieter Brinkman did a presentation of Sitecore’s core values:
- Innovation — solutions to solve the problems of tomorrow
- Time to Market — speed throughout the project lifecycle
- Enhancements — rock solid stability and performance
Sitecore casually dropped 9.1.1 during the conference, and I’ve now had some time to get familiar with the changes. Being a point release, there’s not much new, just a plethora of bug fixes. For me, the highlights are a whole lot of EXM and SXA bug fixes. This is proof of the core value of Enhancements. Sitecore is a beast of a platform to put it mildly, and we’re all human so bugs will happen and mistakes will be made. But these last couple of releases (9.1.0 and 9.1.1) have had so many bug fixes — if there’s ever been a time to upgrade it’s now.
Pieter then went on to announce that Sitecore 9.2.0 will be available by 30 June at the latest, and went over a few cool new features.
- Personalisation dashboard
- Search service
- Sitecore Host improvements
- Support for Forms and SXA on JSS
- Identity Server Single Sign Out support
It’s great that Sitecore are continuing their focus on Host and their goal to split up the monolith in to a service oriented architecture. For those that don’t know anything about Host, it’s the new .NET Core platform that all the services will be hosted on / eventually migrated to. Currently Identity Server is using it, and Publishing Service is being ported to it (slated for release with 9.2), and Search Service will be using it. For those with large Sitecore installations where indexing is a significant load on their CM server, I’m sure you’ll be excited about that change.
Some of the other presentations
I attended Jeremy Davis’ presentation on how to use the Visual Studio Profiler effectively to measure , identify, and fix performance and memory issues. This to me was totally one of the best presentations of the event. It feels weird to admit that after using Visual Studio since 2006 I learned so much about the profiling tool, but I know I wasn’t the only one.
Mark Cassidy gave a talk on how to 10x your Sitecore development. He started with a disclaimer that he doesn’t know anything about JSS, but knows enough about SXA to be dangerous. He showed how he built a mostly functional site in 15 hours. This included 20 components, all styling, all experience editor friendly. Some standard components that he didn’t include were site search and sitemap, but these are out of the box in SXA so I’ll absolutely forgive him for that. I found this talk great because the message was that we don’t need to be using all sorts of bleeding edge tools, stacks, and libraries to deliver business value. In fact, these things are more often than not slowing us down with their complexity. Just keep it simple — use “1 of everything” for each content module you make. 1 Controller, 1 View, 1 Model, 1 Repository, 1 Datasource template. In general, trying to share and reuse any of the above between components is just shooting yourself in the foot. Some exceptions apply, for example if the html rendered is exactly the same.
Pete Navarra physically demonstrated how using a service bus to pass messages around modules of a system is not only easy, in many cases it is actually more performant than REST or similar. Service buses are not a new invention by any means, but Sitecore is embracing them and putting them to use more and more. They’re here to say and should definitely be used if you have a need to offload work from one server to another.
I also want to mention a talk from the Sitecore Experience Day (which was the day before SUGCON at the same location). Mike Shaw talked about personalisation in Sitecore. Here’s an action shot:
He really opened my eyes on what data we collect about users is valuable. This slide in particular:
This really helped to put into perspective the power of different bits of data that we might have on a member. As an example: thanks to GeoIP and Device Detection we know where they are and what device they’re on. Why not take it a step further without being too creepy, and give them suggestions based on the weather in their location. For example an eCommerce site that stocks umbrellas might promote them more if it’s currently raining in their location. Another good example would be a financial services site that says “Feeling washed out? Why not speak to a financial planner!”. I think it really adds a touch of humanity to the experience.
The slides from most of the other SUGCON talks are available here, but those were some of my favourite parts and I can’t wait for the next one. Thanks for reading.
