Blog Posts

In this episode our host Brian McKeiver is joined by Michael Kinkaid, CTO of Reason One and Kentico MVP. Brian and Michael recap what just happened in Denver at Kentico Connection 2019. They cover day 1 and day 2 highlights, how the round table and panel conversations went, the fantastic venue of the event, and wrap up with the most important takeaways of the event.

Spoiler alert: It was a pretty amazing event as always. Keep reading to either watch or listen to the lastest episode of the Kentico Rocks podcast.

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Episode 24 of Kentico Rocks features special guests Kyle Mathews, Founder/CEO of Gatsby and the Gatsby open source project, and Ilesh Mistry, Kentico Architect at MMT Digital. I'm very grateful that both Kyle and Ilesh were able to join me to discuss Gatsby, as I am a huge fan of the technology and think that Gatsby and JAMStack in general are the future of where web development is going (especially when you throw in Kentico Kontent to connect your static site to become fully editable). That's why I even presented on it this year at the Detroit Tech Watch.

Our goal for this episode was to let developers out there know why the combination of Kentico Kontent and Gatsby together is such a killer combination (spoiler alert, the performance is amazing). We even talked about a few specific plugins and starter templates to get you started. Listen to the lastest episode after the jump.

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In little less than a week from now, October 2nd-4th, Kentico developers, partners, employees, and customers will make the annual pilgrimage the largest Kentico event of the year, Kentico Connection. This year the event is located Denver, CO (again). I'm happy to announce that this will be the 8th time that I am speaking at the conference.

There are a ton of new topics this year, like the re-brand of Kentico Cloud to Kentico Kontent, .Net Standard support in Kentico EMS (and eventually .Net Core), and the rise of #KenticoPhoenix. If you are at all interested in attending Connection to hear about topics like these, I couldn't recommend it more. In fact I recently recorded a podcast episode on why Kentico Connections rocks.

This time I will be giving a session titled the "Best of Both Worlds". That's a pretty brave statement in the context of both Business and Technical worlds. What I really mean here is how do we keep digital and marketing teams happy at the same time as technical teams. I hope to communicate why I feel hitting the best of both worlds is possible. Keep reading after the jump for the full abstract of my session.

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I'm speaking again next week, September 13, 2019. This time I will be giving a session at Prairie.Code() 2019 in Des Moines, IA. This is another conference I have not been to before, but it is part of the highly regarded Amegala tech conference series. I have personally heard many good things about these conferences and how good of a job Amegala does in organizing them. 

I am presenting on improving some soft skills that all developers our there can benefit from with my favorite presentation of the year "How to Win Friends and Influence...Better Developer Estimates". I have given this talk a few times now, and the feedback and particiation from the audiences at THAT Conference and Code PaLOUsa have been amazing. As a result, I'm excited to be off and traveling to lovely Iowa to talk about developer estimates.

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Today I have a quick update for Kentico developers out there on my KenticoCacheDoctor project. In case you are not famliar with it, KenticoCacheDoctor is my mini open source project for working with Kentico 12.0 and Caching. I'm happy to announce that version 2.0 has been released as an updated NuGet package. A HUGE thank you goes out to Sean G. Wright for his contribution to the project, as this whole update was created by him. 

Not only did Sean clean up some of my lazy coding, he also created an integration into Kentico.Glimpse for KenticoCacheDoctor. That's right, now you can install a slightly different new NuGet package and the information that KenticoCacheDoctor provides is shown as a custom tab in Glimpse, just like the Kentico.SQL tab is shown for debugging Kentico SQL statements.

Keep reading after the jump to see this new integration.

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In this episode of Kentico Rocks I highlight the biggest event of the year in the Kentico world, Kentico Connections. If you are not sure if the Connections event is right for you, not sure on what will be covered at the event, or are on the fence about attending, than this episode is just for you. I also go into a few details about the Kentico EMS Product roadmap, what's coming up for Kentico 2020, and a shout out to MK's Ketchup. 

Lastly, I cover the Kentico Parter Summit agenda at a high level. So if you are a Kentico Partner or Kentico focused business the second half of the episode is a must listen.

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I'm speaking once again this coming week at Code PaLOUsa in Louisville, KY. Code PaLOUsa is a multi-day software development conference, located in Louisville, KY, designed to cover all aspects of software development regardless of technology stack. The conference schedule features presentations from many well-known professionals in the software development community.

This will actually be my third time speaking at this conference, and it ranks up there as one of my favorites. The organizers do a great job of planning the conference, and it doesn't hurt that the venue is almost always right in downtown Louisville (where there is a ton to do). I actually have double duty this week as I am speaking on both Thursday and Friday. 

Keep reading after the jump to find out which two sessions I am presenting.

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Wow, I can't believe that I forgot to mention this here, but I'm speaking again, tomorrow! This time I will be giving a session at THAT Conference in Wisconsin Dells, WI. I have not been to this conference before and am super excited about attending and presenting for the first time. Apparently THAT Conference is the second largest developer conference in the region (just a bit shy of CodeMash) with over 1700 attendees of diverse technology backgrounds and expertise levels. Oh and did I mention that the venue is a giant indoor / outdoor water park? That doesn't hurt either.

This is an interesting presentation for me, as I am shifting gears a little bit from my normal technical deep dive on a topic. Instead, I am presenting on improving some soft skills that all developers our there can benefit from. Keep reading after the jump to hear more about my session on "How to Win Friends and Influence...Better Developer Estimates".

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Over the past many years, there is one pretty important thing I have learned while working with Kentico (and most other Web based CMS platforms out there). That one thing I have learned is that when it comes to problems with a page not showing the right results, or the code not working, or the content not quite lining up the right way; it almost always boils down to one of three things. Those three things in Kentico EMS are macros for dynamic content (and all the fun macro security issues that come with them), client side browser cache (where the latest Javascript file is not being loaded or is stale), and server side caching (where the CMS has placed data in the server memory and the latest page is not being sent down to the user's browser).

With Kentico's focus on MVC first for the latest Kentico 12 SP1, that last one, server side caching, is actually more important and fun to deal with than ever. The thing is with MVC, the caching strategy you use is up to you, and there are many different ways to do it. One of the most powerful ways is add what's called Output Caching into the solution. Output Caching is excellently detailed out over on Michal Samuhel's blog post on fixing a slow Kentico MVC site. If you have not read that post, STOP, and go read it right now. Then come back over here.  

In working with Kentico MVC sites for over 3 years, I have seen many issues during project development cycles that were resolved by simply clearing the page's Output Cache and/or restarting the app pool for the MVC live site. This is fine and all, but it does take a bit of time to do this and slows down the development process. To combat this I have decided to work on a little add-on for Kentico MVC development that gives the developer a quick short cut to clear the Cache without having to restart the site. Enter the Kentico Cache Doctor.

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I don't think there could be a more special episode than episode 22 of Kentico Rocks. I say that because it was recorded live with almost all of the Kentico MVPs in the world at the 2019 Kentico MVP Summit in Brno, Czech Republic. Yes that's right your friendly neighborhood MVPs were all gathered in one place for an entire week at Kentico's headquarters. That just does not happen very often.

During the episode you can hear a little bit about what the MVP Summit is and what it takes to be an MVP for Kentico for those interested in the global Kentico development community. We also get into Kentico EMS 12.0 Service Pack 1 details, new Custom Elements and the new Editorial Calendar in Kentico Cloud, and great resources in Github for Kentico developers out there.

Remember, you can now subscribe to the Kentico Rocks podcast on spotify! So click on over to that and start following Kentico Rocks today.

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