The Reflections – 2020

As we are getting towards the end of 2020, I believe this is the best time to write about what I contributed to the technical community this year.

Over 14 years in Information Technology and over 11 years since I started working with Sitecore, I came across several people who helped me, mentored me and I learned a lot during this journey. A big thanks to all my mentors.

The Resolve

Like the past few years, this year, I again decided to contribute meaningfully to the tech community. But this year, I also decided to do this online (that was before covid).

The idea was to keep aside a day or two every month to do something relevant to the community. Be it writing an article, getting involved in a community event, delivering talks (and in the process starting a new meetup ?, see below), creating a YouTube channel, and most importantly keep learning, be it going through trainings or attending talks and conferences.

The Blogs

I started at the beginning of the year and during the year, I made a point to write a blog every month.

You can read all my blogs here.

Coffee at the Sitecore Experience Day

This was the last in-person event I attended before Covid and before lockdown restrictions came into effect. This was the last time when I met amazing people from the Sitecore Community face to face. What a day it was, inspiring talks by Sitecore executives and the customers. AND yes, the coffee with my face on it.

The Talk at SUGCON EU

In April, I got an opportunity to speak at virtual SUGCON an amazing conference organized by the Sitecore enthusiasts every year. Though the in-person conference got cancelled, this amazing group quickly improvised and moved the conference online.

Community Sponsorships

SUGCON EU

Assurex was the Lanyard sponsor at SUGCON EU, unfortunately, the event got cancelled due to COVID and hopefully, we will be back as sponsors next year.

SUGCON India

I also planned to run the Sitecore Commerce workshop at SUGCON India but unfortunately, that event was also cancelled due to COVID.

Hopefully, this all be soon behind us and we will be back at these events next year.

More Blogs

I stuck to my resolve to write a blog every month when I was not doing other community activities and started ‘Under the Hood’ series to write about the aspects of the Sitecore Commerce platform which are often overlooked or not as widely understood and causing many implementations to run into problems or fail.

I recently wrapped up this series and you can read all the blogs in this series at – https://assurex.co/blogs/under-the-hood/

The Commerce Bytes

With my experience working with eCommerce platforms, in June, the idea struck me to start a new meetup focused on Commerce, and hence, I started ‘theCommerceBytes’. This was the first time I got involved in organizing a meetup. Due to Covid, everything moved to the virtual mode and we could afford to bring in eminent speakers from anywhere in the world to talk to the audiences from anywhere in the world.

We had our first meeting in July and since then we are meeting on the last Thursday of every month.

The Speakers

In July, we had Global Commerce Architect from Sitecore, Timothy Steleman, and India’s first Microsoft AI MVP, Regional Director, and author of six books, Nishith Pathak as speakers.

In August, Senior Commerce Architect, Erwin Werkman from Sitecore and Vasiliy Fomichev, who is 6x Sitecore MVP spoke at the event.

Then in September, we had Vandana Verma, Global Board of Directors at OWASP, and Sandeep Pote, Commerce Architect at Assurex.

Varun Nehra, Sitecore MVP and VP of Architecture at Altudo spoke in November. I also got an opportunity to speak in the November edition ?

Know more about TheCommerceBytes and register for the January edition at https://bit.ly/com-byte

I would also like to thank the teams at Sitecore who helped promote these events and agreed to be a speaker at these sessions.

The talk at SUGCON NCR

I, along with my Colleague, Sandeep Pote also got an opportunity to speak at Sitecore User Group Conference, NCR.

The YouTube Channel

How can we afford to lose the knowledge shared by so many eminent speakers, hence I decided to launch a YouTube Channel. All our CommerceBytes videos and other talks are available to replay on this channel.

The Sitecore Symposium

This year Symposium was virtual, none the less it was a great event as always. Exciting talks by distinguished speakers, product insights, virtual meetings, it still had that flavour albeit virtually. Looking forward to meeting you all in Las Vegas next year.

The Training

This one is the preparation for next year. In November 2020, I went through Content Hub training and passed the assessments. In the new year, I am looking forward to sharing my knowledge around this amazing platform.

The Future – 2021

If I look back, I can proudly say that most of the goals I set out for myself are achieved.

In the next year, I am looking to continue with the initiatives I started in 2020.

In addition to that, I am looking at the possibility of providing technical training to the fresh graduates in order for them to be market-ready for their careers in IT.

Thanks for reading this. I hope you will have a great Holiday Season and a Happy New Year. Hope to see you in 2021. Namaste!