Akshay Sura: How to be a Sitecore architect in a Composable DXP world

Akshay in March 2022, you spoke at Sugcon Europe on the main stage. What was the topic of your talk and what did you try to get across to the audience? So in March, when we did the Sugcon Europe. Kamruz and I basically talked about how it is to be a Sitecore architect in a composable DXP world. It was interesting for us because since 2018, Kamruz and I have spent quite a bit of time evaluating other headless CMSs the whole composable, DXP and Jamstack. And we had like certain criteria in order for us to see what it would take. And this was way before Sitecore even jumped on the composable DXP train. So we were looking at what systems are there, how does it work? And we were coming from a very .NET background and the composable jam tech world is very API based. You could do it in anything you want, but it's predominantly ruled by JavaScript frameworks. So Kamruz knew a lot more JavaScript frameworks than I did, but we were looking at different categories to see if we were to look for a headless CMS. What would it take? If we were to look for a headless commerce? What would it take? And based on our learnings, we thought it would be a good topic for us to present because it's been almost. 2019 was the last time we did Sugcon. And usually Sugcon EU is a huge affair but 600 developers come in person an amazing event and it's an event where you get knowledge which you can take home right now and use it. Not something which you can use five months from now or a year from now. That's what makes it so special. You could talk to your peers about. "Hey, this is a problem I'm having, how do you solve it?". So we thought this is the first in person since 2019. This would be a great topic, especially because in these three years of COVID and not having physical conferences, Sitecore had moved more onto the composable part of it, so they started buying a couple of different companies, which puts them on the composable track. So we thought, like us, there are several other architects and developers who are based Sitecore who might have questions like. "Where is my place in Sitecore going full JS frameworks and I'm out of a job?". So we came up with this talk where we kind of go through as a Sitecore architect, what are you doing? What do you, what you should be doing as an architect? The definition for an architect, what your role is and thinking outside the box, no longer looking at it from just one angle, right? Sitecore themselves have said many times that. "Hey, we play well with competitors. In the composable where you have to, because not one provider provides every piece of the puzzle you need. That's what composable is". So in order to unmake Sitecore architects understand that what the architecture should be, going outside your comfort zone and looking at technologies which solve your problem. Then, rather than fitting a technology into the problem you're trying to solve, which might mean you have to get technologies from different venders or reuse what the customer is already using. And then we talk a little bit from the .NET developer in that your role isn't done. There's still frameworks, you could still write in .NET core and MVC and use frameworks like static is a lot of work from server-less functions, which you have to do in order to get work done. So, our talk was about a Sitecore architect in a composable DXP world, but it also covers .NET developers. So that's the long and short of it.