Sugcon 2023 - Composable in Malaga

 Sugcon 2023

Better late than never..  a post about a really very good edition of Sugcon. I had my issues getting there but I'm glad I did. Meeting the people from the Sitecore community again in person was really good and we had some good talks, laughs, kebabs and a few drinks.

This year we gathered in Torremolinos (Malaga - Spain) at the Melia convention center. We've had worse locations than this ☺

It didn't take that long to find the rooftop bar(s), the local kebab within walking distance of that bar, the beach for a morning walk...  and of course: the people - our precious Sitecore community. Networking is a part of such a conference that you should not underestimate. And when you have been around for a while as I am you start getting to know a few people.

But we are also gathered here of course to learn something. To get some new insides,  hear from Sitecore what is on their table and from community members what they have achieved or are struggling with. I was glad to do my part in this by speaking about composable and customers.

The Sitecorians

Let's see what the people from Sitecore had to tell us. Of course new features and such - and if you are interested in those you will also be interested in the rather new changelog which can be found on https://developers.sitecore.com/changelog. 

Dave O'Flanagan was the first one to give us some sneak peaks about what they are working on. 

Components was mentioned and did get it's own session later one. They also seem to be working on a complete revamp for the content editor in XM Cloud (Explorer) and a new Forms module is in the making as well - although very little details are known about this yet. 

As you might notice, all interesting things are happening in the composable cloudy areas. That is a trend that will not be stopped and which also influenced a lot of the other sessions. 

Let's stick with the red Sitecore brigade a bit. It was very nice to see so many of them present which lead to many good conversations about Search, Horizon Pages, and so on. I do hope that if you were present you also took the opportunity to give and get some feedback in person. But next to that there were some interesting sessions from them as well. To pick a few: Ivan on Sitecore Connect, Sebastian on Components and Bart on Yarp - which is not a Sitecore product but a tool that might help to make the switch to a headless CMS more gradual. 

And we should also not forget the representatives from the Content Hub One team (Ezgi and Hande) who showed us what they did and what they will be doing next. I do hope that localization will be delivered.

 

The community

Sugcon also had many speakers from our beloved community of course. Too many to mention here - and I also couldn't see all the sessions obviously. So I will just name a few that I remember for various reasons so that you might check those when recordings are available or when they are repeated in local user group sessions. 

So in random order:

• Jason Wilkerson going totally hipster with headless SXA
• Vasiliy Fomichev securing a composable setup
• Rob Habraken migrating to XM Cloud
• Timothy Marsh doing amazing things with Content Hub
• and can I mention myself as well? 😊  Selling composable to customers - with a few 🐈🐈 

There were many more - so a big thanks to all of them to be part of this. And all visitors for being there (otherwise there was no Sugcon). And surely also thanks to the organizers.. they certainly deserve their picture here too:

I would also like to mention the more entertaining sessions. 

To be honest when I noticed the closing keynote was virtual I did had my doubts - but Scott Hanselman is an amazing speaker and even remote he managed to entertain and inspire the whole room. 

Entertainment also came from the community... and not only at the bar - although I do think they had a few drinks before going on stage:

 

And that's it folks. Sugcon was great, Malaga was great. Time to go home. Hopefully till next time...