2016 Kentico Technical Evangelism Year in Review

Over the past year, the Kentico technical community has seen a lot of great advancements, both internally and externally. We released Kentico 10, and with it unleashed a new enterprise-level solution for developers to build out their solutions. We tricked out the platform’s MVC and CI support by adding ecommerce and OM capabilities. And let’s not forget Kentico Cloud! This entire new product line opens up the door for all sorts of development for propriety and open-source solutions. It’s been a busy year, to say the least!

With all these advances and announcements, the Technical Evangelism program was certainly busy in 2016. If we weren’t writing blogs or hosting webinars, we were hosting events and presenting tons of new info to the community. Just how much, you ask? Let’s take a look at the numbers…

2016 By the Numbers

I have a personal goal of publishing a blog a week. It’s a lot to do, but I’ve always looked at it like this:  If I were trying to inform on a product or system, I’d expect the Technical Evangelist for that product/system to constantly be producing new information to help the community. So with that in mind, articles are always one of my top priorities as I try to come up with new concepts and solutions to help guide the community. And hopefully answer some questions along the way. But it’s not all blogs! Check out the stats for the past year:

2016 Stats

• 47 Blogs
• 12 Developers newsletters
• 11 Webinars
• 6 Conferences
• 8 User Groups
• 2 Community Webinars
• 4 Kentico 1-on-1 Interviews
• 10 Polls
• 9 Kentico MVPs
• 2 External Blogs Published

Much like last year, we really tried to spread the information around to as many areas as possible. Some people really like blogs, so naturally that is where we focus the most. But sometimes a webinar or an in-person event is the only way to get the point across. Because of that, we strive to present at conferences and user groups around the world, bringing all kinds of Kentico know-how to developers in every region.

Personal Highlights

Every day I get to interact with developers and pass along knowledge about the platform. Whether that’s a Skype call, webinar, or over a beer, working with the community is easily my favorite part of the job. This year, we introduced Kentico Cloud, which provided an entirely new topic to communicate. Because of that, I’d have to say writing the Building an MVC Site with Kentico Cloud blog series was probably my favorite article series for the year. To write it, I had to go through the process myself, creating a new MVC site from scratch and integrating in Kentico Draft, Deliver, and Engage. This gave me lots of practical knowledge on the challenges developers may face when using the platform, so I documented as many aspects as I could in the series.

For events, it’s hard to top the 404 Digital conference. (I mean, it’s Vegas!) It was an exciting new conference with a lot of changes from previous years. My favorite parts were the Hands-On Labs. At previous conferences, we often had feedback that developers never “learned” anything new, and didn’t get a chance to get their hands on the product. For the 404, we created several in-depth labs, designed to walk developers through many of the new feature sin Kentico 10 and Kentico Cloud. We received mixed reviews from the attendees on this aspect of the conference, however, I still enjoy making the materials and helping attendees work through the exercises.

What’s Ahead in 2017?

Looking ahead at 2017, I’m really excited about all the Technical Evangelism possibilities within the community. With Kentico 10’s new beefed-up performance, expect a lot of great articles and posts about how to build out large, enterprise-level solutions, capable of handling whatever you decide to throw at it. Kentico Cloud is going to enable non-.NET developers and others to develop unique, cloud-driven solutions in nearly any language. And the KC team is continuing to add new features and capabilities. There’s definitely no shortage of interesting topics to talk about and events to attend.

So here’s to a great year, friends. Thanks for all the great memories and discussions over the past 12 months. Get ready, because 2017 is going to be awesome. See you next year!