2017 Kentico Technical Evangelism Year in Review

I’m a goal-oriented person. I’m always striving to make the community as great a place for developers as I can. I try new things, look at the results, and make tweaks where it makes sense. Sometimes I knock it out the park. Sometimes it’s a bit of an air-ball. In the end, I like to think that here at Kentico, we do a great job of connecting with our development community and providing them the best developer experience we can.

So, let’s take a look at how 2017 shaped up….

2017 by the numbers

So many professions live and die by numbers. From time to time, everyone needs to take a look at what they’ve accomplished and see how it aligns with their goals. Each year, I compile a list of activities, articles, and other events we have attended and participated in. It’s a great way to see the impact the Technical Evangelism team has had on the community, and where we may want to focus our efforts more on in the future.

Here’s what we did over the past 12 months:

• 60 Blogs
• 12 Developers newsletters
• 9 Roadshows
• 4 Conferences / Code camps
• 6 User Groups
• 3 Partner summits
• 9 Partner visits
• 1 MVP summit
• 2 Community interviews
• 2 Kentico 1-on-1 Interviews
• 3 Webinars
• 11 Kentico MVPs
• 1 Microsoft Azure MVP

As you can see, 2017 brought a lot of content (blogs), and a nice mix of large and small events. We really focused on connecting with our partner and development community by participating in user groups, partner visits, and summits. Our partners often given the best (and VERY honest) feedback that we receive, so we try and take as much of it in as possible.

We also branched out our content into the Kentico Cloud and microservice space. As this is a huge growth area for the community, we wanted to make sure we provided you with as much content as possible. For our blogs, we split about 50/50 with EMS vs Cloud topics.

What’s coming in 2018?

While 2017 was a great year for connecting with the community, in 2018 we want to do even more! For the Kentico T/E team, we want to engage our existing community, but also grow it by leaps and bounds.

Let’s grow this thing!

In the coming year, we’re really going to focus on bringing new developers into the ecosystem. From open source to .NET, we want everyone to know how awesome it is to work with Kentico products and services. So, look for us to attend more technology-agnostic events, integrate with 3^rd party systems, and reach out to developers around the world.

Less frequent, higher quality content

For the past 3 years, we’ve focused a lot on producing regular, relevant content. Since I started at Kentico nearly 3 years ago, I have written at least a blog a week on some Kentico related topic. (That’s over 170 blogs!). While I really enjoy writing (and hope you enjoy reading), we want to get more relevant, focused content out to the community. For 2018, look for more targeted topics and samples, aimed to bring the very best information we can about our products. This may mean less articles, but a lot of great demos and samples you can use in your application development.

We are also plugging ourselves in with evangelists around the world. It’s going to bring some unique articles and joint projects to the community, showcasing some pretty awesome integrations. Look for us to publish some sample projects and articles aimed at integrating Kentico EMS and Kentico Cloud into a variety of other 3^rd party systems.

Spreading the word

Here at Kentico, we only have so many resources. Much like every other tech company, finding talent is a challenge as we look for only the very best to be a part of our team. While we’d love to be everywhere for every event, it’s just not possible. For 2018, we are planning on increasing our evangelism in other ways. From unique events and contests, to leveraging our great MVPs, look for Kentico to be at a conference near you, bringing the latest news about the platform.

2018 and beyond

So, there you have it friends! A jam-packed year full of articles, events, and a whole lot of discussions with developers. I’ve loved every minute of it and can’t wait to keep the party going in 2018. If there’s every anything we can do better, please let us know! We’re here to make developing with Kentico as awesome as we can and it all starts with YOU! Let’s rock 2018, my friends!