Sitecore hosted their second Virtual Developer Day on 7th March. This was a free online event offering a series of webcasts on Sitecore related topics by a variety of speakers from the community. After filling in a simple registration form the, presentation link is sent to your Inbox and you can log in.
As a freelancer I personally find it worthwhile every so often to down tools and take a day out to watch and read up on some of the interesting content produced by the Sitecore community. Virtual Developer Day makes this easy by bringing together a bunch of presentations which were recorded as part of Sitecore Symposium in Florida last year.
Each video was scheduled to start at a preset time in one of four timezones. Once a video had started it immediately switched into a “on demand mode” which meant it could be streamed at your leisure thereafter.
If you value your time, (and you should!) it’s important to make the videos work for you. I recommend picking the topics/speakers you’re interested in and having something to do in between the videos, or potentially end up procrastinating and wasting large parts of the day. I had other client work to do alongside/in between the videos so it ended up being a productive “day off”.
It didn’t take me long to figure out that rather than wait for the videos I was interested in to start I could switch the selected time zone to Australia time and watch any of the videos on demand rather than wait for them to be broadcast at a preset time.
The On24 webinar interface made for a nice experience – the video and accompanying slides were presented in resizable windows together with a built in twitter window for social interaction, the format worked well.
Picks of the days for me were:
- Martina Welander‘s guide to privacy and GDPR in Sitecore was delivered enthusiastically on what might otherwise be a dry topic
- Raul Jimenez presenting a great video on harnessing the power of Docker for Sitecore development
- Sheetal Jain‘s engaging presentation on Salesforce integration with Sitecore.
- Kelly Rusk‘s dulcit tones on his SIF Deep dive
- Martin Davies‘ Helix Smells – detailing solutions to issues that often crop up when implementing Helix patterns in development
At the time of writing you can still register to view the videos and therefore stream them at your leisure.