2019 has been a remarkable year for me, both on a personal level as well as on a Sitecore level.

At the beginning of the year I received my 10th Sitecore MVP title from Sitecore, this year I got moved to the Ambassador category, after being a Technology MVP for the past 9 years. The past years I’ve been mostly organising Sitecore community events (SUGNL, SUGCON), hence I moved more into an ambassador role than into a technology role. With that shift and knowing where I came from, 2019 for me has been more a shift back to the technology stack.

As a Sitecore Architect and Sitecore Specialist my focus is way more technical than strategy focused or just promoting Sitecore. In this blogpost I would like to write down what I’ve accomplished in 2019.

Sitecore community

With the Core Community Friend Award selection coming up in October 2019, and the Sitecore MVP 2020 selection coming up in November, to give a good overview of what I’ve done I thought: why not write it up in a blog?

Both titles, in my opinion, are all about what you do for the Sitecore Community. Below you can find the following community contributions I’ve made this year:

Sitecore blogs (technical & semi-technical)

SUGCON Europe 2019

In 2019 I’ve been one of the organizers for SUGCON Europe 2019, Europe’s largest Sitecore conference, which I co-founded and started back in 2014. This was my 6th year as an organizer. With over 600 people this was one of the best SUGCON conferences to date. As one of the founders back in 2014 of SUGCON Europe, I’ve been responsible for setting up the new theme (yeah we know it’s WordPress atm ;-)) of the website and doing the content entry. Besides that, and way more important, co-responsible for the selection of speakers, determining the topics. Invested over a couple of hundred hours into it. From the community for the community. Overall, it was a huge success and I think it was on the best conferences Sitecore and the SUGCON Europe team did.

Sitecore User Group Netherlands (SUGNL)

SUGNL, which I co-founded back in 2012, is one of the biggest Sitecore User Groups out there in Europe. With over 50 to 60 people at each meetup, SUGNL has organised 5 SUGNL meetups and SUGCON Europe 2019. I’ve opened and/or organised the following meetups:

January 23rd, 2019 – Macaw, Amsterdam

April 4-5, 2019 – SUGCON Europe 2019, London

May 15th, 2019 – Virtual Affairs, Amsterdam

July 2nd, 2019 – Achmea, Zeist

September 11th, 2019 – We are you Den Bosch, ‘s Hertogenbosch

December 10th, 2019 – Mirabeau/Cognizant, Amsterdam (Presenting there on Sitecore Habitat Home)

Other Sitecore blogs & announcements

Sitecore open-source contributions

I contributed to or shared the following Sitecore open-source projects/code:

Sitecore MVP contest

Ended up on the 2nd place of the Sitecore Symposium MVP Contest! So happy to have helped Sitecore with increasing some ticket sales for their conference. I’ll be enjoying the limo ride to the fullest, haha.

Hopefully in 2020 my contributions will even be more technical. Horizon, Docker, JSS, Cortex, the Sitecore world is exciting and moving fast. Certainly happy to be back blogging again!

CU somewhere in the Sitecore Community, the best community out there!

Robbert