2025 SUGCON journey to Antwerpen

SUGOCON 2025 Europe is taking place in Antwerpen this year. While not being in the same country as where I'm from, it's basically in my backyard. Normally I'd be able to be in Antwerpen in about 1h15min. Today however I had a small bit of a setback that the international train connecting to my local train had been cancelled. No worries, I enjoyed a bit of sun in the city of Breda in the Netherlands on a bench in the park. An hour later the train did depart and off to Antwerpen I went.

SUGCON sessions I'll be visiting

As a Sitecore developer with focus on headless development I'm always looking out for sessions that will bring my knowledge to the next level. Over the past 2 years I've had the pleasure to implement a XM Cloud solution. Naturally anything related to Next.js or XMC are the sessions I'm looking most forward to. This year there is an abundance of those.

• Building the Future: Extending XM Cloud with Marketplace Apps This talk will be given by Sypros Misichronis (Sotware architect @ Sitecore) and Liz Nelson (Product Lead of XM Cloud, Sitecore) It will be centered around the (new) Marketplace SDK and how this enables people to build extensions to integrate them seamlessly with XM Cloud's APIs I'm very excited to see how this enables us developers to get the most out of our XM Cloud implementations

• Lessons learned: 2 years after building our first XM Cloud platform This session is hosted by Derk Hudepol (Avanade, CX Solution lead & architect). Lessons learned about implementing Sitecore can be super interesting if you're either looking to do the same, or you just want to compare notes. Secretly I'm hoping that I will walk away knowing that the implementation I've just completed for (let's say 98%) doesn't stray too far from the things in this talk. It'll be interesting to see if I can still walk away with new things learned.

• The Future of Design Library for Multi-Site, Multi-Channel content This session is hosted by Eirini Kalampogia (Product Director, Sitecore) & Liz Nelson (Product Lead of XM Cloud, Sitecore). I'm curious to see how far the component builder has come since the initial launch of XM Cloud. The summary of this session talks of enhancing the Developer efficiency by integrating with clients codebase. As I've only worked with building headless SXA components, I'm curious to see if this will mean integration of headless SXA with Component Builder.

• Step-by-step optimization for Next.js and Sitecore JSS This session will be hosted as the first of the breakout session on Friday by Alex Hawley (). optimization your Sitecore implementations for better customer satisfaction is a no-brainer. I will definitly learn a thing or two however

• Elevating Developer Experience: Modernizing the JSS SDK and Starter Kits for XM Cloud. This session will be hosted by Christian Hahn (Sitecore) and Liz Nelson (Product Lead of XM Cloud, Sitecore). This might be the session I'm most interested in! I've played around with the JSS repository in the past but improving the DevEx would mean easier contributing towards the JSS SDK's, I'm very excited for this session!

• Synchronizing Sitecore XM Cloud content with Azure DevOps. Hosted by Robbert Hock (UxBee). This lightning talk will sure be informational on how to keep content in sync between PROD and lower environments. Something I haven't touched upon yet so takeaways to come!

There are more sessions around headless development, but these are the ones I'm visiting for sure! I'll probably be knackered by the end of friday, so hopefully I'll be able to collate my thoughts of these sessions in the weeks to follow!