A Busy 2018...
As a Sitecore developer, 2018 has been an amazing year for me. January started off with the release of my first Sitecore module, the Sitecore Publish Reporting Kit (SPRK). SPRK set out to solve a common request of many Sitecore clients: "how do I see what items were published and when?" The module was later updated with additional reporting features and performance enhancements.
January closed out with the best news of the year: I became a 2018 Sitecore Technologist MVP. This humbling distinction has introduced me to a community of welcoming technology and marketing experts.
As the year progressed, I updated Sitecore Spark several times with design tweaks, new long-term content (Resources) and shifted focus to blogging for a while.
In the spring, I co-founded of the Denver Sitecore User Group with fellow Sitecore MVP SitecoreSandbox. We definitely scraped the first couple of meetings together, but by the fall out membership has grown to seventy-five and we have a regular, quarterly meeting cadence with great attendance.
I broke out into speaking this year, which was a major personal achievement. While I've presented in front of clients and small groups at work, this year I traveled to and spoke at our own Denver SUG and the always-awesome Milwaukee SUG. I used these engagements to refine my "Beyond Components" talk to its final version.
October saw me at Sitecore Symposium 2018 and the 2018 MVP Summit in Orlando, Florida. In a year full of constant travel, this was one of my most memorable trips: beautiful weather, wonderful venue, great content, and a look ahead to all-things Sitecore 9.1. I was able to meet many people in the Sitecore MVP community - many more names than I'll list here - but each and every one made an impact on me.
Finally, I released my second Sitecore module: Content Author Tokens for Sitecore (CATS). Content token replacement isn't a new concept in Sitecore, but many token managers tend to be developer-driven. CATS was built with two core ideas in mind: content authors should be in control of tokens, and tokens should render -fast-, with no impact to page render times.
... A Busier 2019
I'm starting off 2019 with more speaking - although not strictly related to Sitecore. Thanks to my efforts and experience speaking in the Sitecore community, I've branched out to speak at other conferences. In January I'm speaking at CodeMash, a technology conference in Sandusky, OH.
Back in the Sitecore world, I'll be ramping up speaking engagements across the US both in person and remotely, with four speaking engagements lined up thus far and more in the pipeline. I'm presenting on topics such as component-based development, Sitecore PowerShell best practices, module development strategies.
My two aforementioned modules, SPRK and CATS, will be getting more attention throughout 2019. Both open source projects are accepting bug fixes, pull requests, and features requests. I have a small backlog of additions that will take both modules to version 2.0, along with updates to support Sitecore 9.1.
Finally, I'm looking forward to learning something new in 2019. I have set goals to dive deeper into SXA, Sitecore Host, and JavaScript Services. I'm expecting to produce plenty of blog and video content from these learning exercises.