Are You Ready for Sitecore MVP Nomination? Reviewing my 2023 Contributions

The Sitecore MVP program is designed to recognize individuals who have demonstrated advanced knowledge of the Sitecore platform and a commitment to sharing knowledge and technical expertise with community partners, customers, and prospects over the past year. The program is open to anyone who is passionate about Sitecore and has a desire to contribute to the community.

Over the past application year starting from December 1st, 2022, I have been actively involved in the Sitecore community, contributing in a number of ways.

Sitecore Blogs

1. This year I have written 45(!) blog posts and that’s at the Perficient site only on the various topics related to Sitecore, including my top-notch findings about XM Cloud and other composable products, best practices, tips and tricks, and case studies. Listing them all by the bullets would make this post too excessive, therefore instead I leave the link to the entire list of them.
2. I’ve been also posting on my very own blog platform, which already contains more than 200 posts about Sitecore accumulated over the past years.

User Groups

1. Organized four Los Angeles Sitecore User Groups  (#15, #16, #17 and #18)
2. Established a organized the most wanted user group of a year – Sitecore Headless Development UserGroup. This one is very special since headless development becomes the new normal of delivering sites with Sitecore, while so many professional feel left behind unable to catch up with the fast emerging tech. I put it as my personal mission to help the community learn and grow “headlessly” and that is one of my commitments to it. There were two events so far (#1 and #2) with a #3 scheduled for December 12th.
3. Facilitated and co-organized Sitecore Southeast Europe User Group (Balkans / Serbia), also am sponsoring it from own pocket (Meetup + Zoom).
4. Presented my new topic “Mastery of XM Cloud” on 17 Jan  at the Jaipur user group, India

SUGCON Conferences 2023

1. Everyone knows how I love these conferences, especially SUGCON Europe. This year I submitted my speech papers again, and  got chosen again with the topic Accelerate Headless SXA Builds with XM Cloud. Last year I hit the same stage with The Ultimate Sitecore Upgrade session.
2. I was very eager attending to SUGCON India and submitted a joint speech with my genius mentee Tiffany Laster – this proposal got chosen (yay!). Unfortunately, at the very last minute, my company changed the priorities, and we were not allowed to travel. Since the remote presentation was not an option there, I have the warmest hopes to present there the following year. Two of my other mentees (Neha Pasi and Mahima Patel) however found their way to that stage and presented a meaningful session on Sitecore Discover. Tiffany was also chosen as a speaker for the following SUGCON NA however with a different topic – DAM Maturity Model.
3. I was a proud member of the SUGCON NA 2023 Organization Committee, which we thought over the past 15 months. We collectively were responsible for wide range of tasks, but my primary personal responsibilities were organizing the session recording, building the event website, choosing the speakers from the speech proposals for building the agenda, and several more. I served as Room Captain for each and every session timeslot on Thursday and the majority on Friday.

GitHub

1. Sifon project keeps going not just maintained but also receiving new features. Sifon gets support for each version of XM/XP releases almost the next day. I am also PoC a composable version of Sifon Cloud, if proven that would be a big thing for XM Cloud. Every time I am involved into Sitecore platform upgrade or any other development or PoCs working outside of containers – Sifon saves me a lot of time and effort.
2. I keep Awesome Sitecore up and actual. This repository is an integral part of a big Awesome Lists family, if you haven’t heard of Awesome Lists and its significance I  highly recommend reading these articles – first and the second.
3. At the beginning of the year made guidance and a demo on how one can pair .NET Headless SDK with XM Cloud in the same containers working nicely together, along with releasing the source code to it.
4. There also few less significant repositories among my contributions that are still meaningful and helpful.

Sitecore Mentor Program

• With lessons learned from the previous year of mentorhip, this time I got 5 mentees, all young, ambitious, genius and I cannot stress out enough how I am proud of them all and their achievements!
• 3 of them found their way to SUGCON conferences as speakers (see below)
• the others still deliver valuable contributions to the community.

MVP Program

• I participate in all the webinars and MVP Lunches (often in both timezones per event) I can only reach out.
• Every past year, I am participating in a very honorable activity helping to review the first-time applicants for the MVP Program. This is a first line of the evaluation and we carefully match every first-time applicant against high Sitecore MVP standards.
• I think MVP Summit is the best perk of MVP Program, so never miss it out. This year I’ve learn so much and provided feedback to the product teams, as usual.

Sitecore Learning

I collaborated with Sitecore Learning team for the past 2-3 years but this year my contributions exceeded the previous ones. Here are some:

• I volunteered to become a beta tester for a new Instructor-led XM Cloud training, and provided valuable feedback upon the completion
• Collaborated with the team on XM Cloud certification exam (sorry cannot be more explicit here due to the NDA)
• I was proud to be chosen as an expert for opening a new Sitecore Tips & Tricks series organized by Sitecore Learning team. In 60 minutes I demonstrated Sitecore Components Builder with an external feed integration from zero to hero actually running it deployed to Vertical, all that with writing zero lines of code (part 1 and part 2). Impressive!

Sitecore Telegram

• Contributed to it even more that in any of previous year, I am making Telegram a premium-level channel for delivering Sitecore news and materials. Telegram has a unique set of features that no other software can offer, and I am leveraging these advantages for more convenience to my subscribers.
• Started in 2017 as a single channel, it was expanding rapidly and now overcoming a milestone of 1,000 subscribers!
• Growth did not stop but escalated further beyond Sitecore going composable with having a dedicated channel for almost any composable product. Here all they are:
  • Main Sitecore Telegram channel
  • XM Cloud
  • Content Hub
  • CDP/Personalize
  • OrderCloud
  • Sitecore Search
  • Sitecore Connect
  • .. and finally, the brand new one devoted exclusively to Headless Development with Sitecore and Next.js

Other Contributions

• Three times over this year I was an invited guest and expert to Sitecore Fireside at Apple Podcasts (one, two, and three)
• I am very active on my LinkedIn (with 4K followers) and Twitter aka X (with almost ~1.2K subscribers), multiple posts per week, sometimes a few a day.
• With my dedication to the new flagship product of Sitecore – XM Cloud there was no wonder I managed to get certified with it among the first. It is a great product and I wish it to become even better!