Author: Jason St-Cyr
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And the award goes to… | A Tale from the Borderlands
I’m sure this is not going to completely backfire on us. I wasn’t wrong about the greeting party at the next stop. Turns out we arrived on some sort of bridge with an absolute enormity of a ship captain in charge. We thought quick and used those armor disguises as best…
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An elevator not to be trusted | A Tale from the Borderlands
Just another day of invading an airship… Sorry about that last log, we landed hot on an airship and things were… shaky. I never thought a ship like that would have such defenses. I had advised folks to come on the ship from behind, avoid the common defenses. We were…
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Remove your AddThis component by May 31, 2023
Oracle has announced that they will be turning off the AddThis service on May 31, 2023 which is going to impact a lot of websites around the web that have been using this for the easy social sharing icons that it provided. How does this affect you? From a Sitecore…
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What kind of name is St-Cyr?
First… Thank you for asking! It’s always fun for me to talk about words and language. 😊 I was recently asked this again, and I decided to capture my response for everybody because this is not the first time somebody has wondered about my name with no vowels! Okay, the…
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Bunkers & Badasses – Badass Moves
Going to take a look again at some more Bunkers and Badasses stuff today. I want to look at something that’s pretty central to the whole thing which is: the Badass Move! The Badass Move is pretty unique in this system. It is basically there to make you do something…
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Riding the clouds! | A Tale from the Borderlands
Just another day of meeting Queens and riding dragons, right? That was not what I was expecting! Just got out of meeting a queen that’s a horse, or unicorn, or some sort of crystal being, or … something? Queen Butt Stallion was regal enough, not every day you meet royalty.…
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Bunkers & Badasses – What exactly is it?
Alrighty why don’t we dig into what exactly is this “Bunkers and Badasses” If you’re familiar with Borderlands, the video game, this kind of artwork it’s going to look familiar to you. Borderlands is a lot about guns and shooting things. Bunkers & Badasses is a lot about guns and…
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SUGCON Europe 2023 – Highlights shared by the community
On March 23rd, the Sitecore community kicked off SUGCON Europe in Malaga, Spain! I can’t be there this year, so I’m living vicariously through all the community folks who are being so kind as to post things online for those of us at home! I started off trying to capture…
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Time for some new threads | A Tale from the Borderlands
Jax’s ECHO Log entry #4: Apparently those Claptraps are good for something. Well, that went surprisingly smoothly. First time anything went as expected, really. I must be getting paranoid because I can’t shake the feeling that means something awful is about to happen. Right before heading back to Brymstone, we tested…
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Sitecore Architect’s Guide to SaaS Migration – XP Marketing Automation
In this part of the migration series, I am going to look at migrating an existing Sitecore Experience Platform (XP) solution that has implemented marketing automation, including email marketing. The scenario breakdown: Follow the series to look at different Sitecore XM and XP scenarios and how you can gradually migrate your Sitecore…
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Lava shark? | A Tale from the Borderlands
Jax’s ECHO Log entry #3: I should not have taunted the knife-wielders. Okay. Time to breathe. Turns out that maybe I should have been a wee bit more careful with that door! They nearly got me that time, it was a damn close call. A bunch of robe-wearing, knife-wielding, vindictive cultists decided…
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Being ready as a parent for the tough questions
While sitting around the dinner table, some interesting discussions were happening… and it got me to thinking: sometimes parenting is just about being prepared for your kid to suddenly trigger discussions on gender identity or critical race theory or dictatorships (in the same week or conversation). I am so glad…
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Fire in the hole! | A Tale from the Borderlands
Jax’s ECHO Log entry #2: They brought a knife to a gunfight. We used one of those awful teleportation gadgets today and found ourselves at some sort of mining facility. I almost didn’t make this log because we were so busy, but the others are arguing over whether to open a…
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First 7 thoughts on editing videos with Clipchamp
Over the holiday break, I decided to try to record a new Bunkers and Badasses video about the Siren class, but this time without using the built-in TikTok creator tools. I tried using Clipchamp, with mixed success. I learned a lot trying this out. Here are 7 things I learned…
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Brymstone is pretty terrible | A Tale from the Borderlands
Jax’s ECHO Log entry #1: Not dead yet. Well, Penny, today was a pretty humiliating day. Luckily, I met some halfway-skilled Vault Hunters that kept my suit from getting too crumpled. The transport dropped us in some tiny village that smells like dead bodies, body odour, and butts. Somehow it…
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My 2022 Unwrapped!
All these apps love telling you about all the stuff you did in the past year, so I started collecting them together along with my own look at things. Here’s how 2022 went for little old me! What didn’t work? A few of the #VoiceTheDocs videos got some decent views…
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Leaving Lynchwood | A Tale from the Borderlands
It’s been a lot of years since I last sat down and played some Table Top roleplaying (TTRPG for those who like their acronyms). This past year, a happenstance allowed me to make some new friends online and join a virtual table playing Bunkers & Badasses, a new TTRPG system…
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How do you convince developers to stick around for the long run?
How do we in #DevRel make developers sticky? Is it the docs? Is it the community? Is it the people you interact with at the vendor? What brings someone past that initial awareness point? #1. Be helpful I came into DevRel via tech evangelism, where I focused a lot on…
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Who should I put on my project team?
Every now and then, somebody has asked me “what should my team look like”? Is there a formula for how you can structure a technical team to be ready for a Sitecore implementation project and then the maintenance afterwards? I’m sorry to say: there is no such formula. Every single…
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Azure Functions – Access has been blocked by CORS policy
It all started by trying to over-engineer things with an Azure Function. And then it wouldn’t work! This blog post is mostly for me so that I can find this stuff later when I inevitably hit the same CORS issue. I had gone through the whole Microsoft tutorial for JavaScript…
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Becoming a Leader – Facing the Unknown
In this series I’ll be writing about some of the challenges of transitioning to being a leader within the team you are in. In this article, I’ll discuss some of the difficulty in changing how you make decisions. When you first transition to go from member of the team to…
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Sitecore Architect’s Guide to SaaS Migration – XP Global Brand scenario
In this part of the migration series, I am going to look at migrating an existing Sitecore Experience Platform (XP) “Global Brand” solution, with many sites and deep personalization usage, over to Sitecore XM Cloud and Sitecore Personalize. The scenario breakdown: Follow the series to look at different Sitecore XM and…
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Becoming a Leader – Letting it go
In this series I’ll be writing about some of the challenges of transitioning to being a leader within the team you are in. In this article, I’ll cover delegation and letting go of your previous responsibilities. When you first transition to go from member of the team to leading that…
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Sitecore Architect’s Guide to SaaS Migration – XM Jamstack scenario
In this part of the migration series, I am going to look at migrating an existing Sitecore XM “Jamstack” solution over to XM Cloud. Follow the series to look at different Sitecore XM and XP scenarios and how you can gradually migrate your Sitecore platform solution over to a composable DXP…
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11 tips for remembering that thing you were supposed to do
I’ve always had memory recall issues. I’ve spent most of my life/career using little ‘tricks’ to cope. For example, I leave a light on in a room, so I force myself to come back to turn it off. Otherwise I’ll forget I have to do something in there. This post…
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Mixed emotions: Saying goodbye to a team member
NOTE: This content was inspired by an earlier post of mine as a thread on Twitter. Something I’ve struggled with when leading a team is saying goodbye. Such a mix of emotions! When somebody gets that next step in their career, it’s so great to see that success! At the…
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Using Camtasia Pixelate options to make your video feel like a retro video game
This is a quick little read covering how you can use the Pixelate transition and annotation to achieve a ‘retro gaming’ feel. I was working on some video production for a #VoiceTheDocs video about Helix and I wanted to do something that felt “8-bit”. You can watch the video I…
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Announcing: #VoiceTheDocs (and Episode 1)
I’ve decided to try out something new: a series of videos trying to bring a voice to documentation! As a dad, I do a lot of reading out loud for my kids. Doing funny voices, or just trying to make a story engaging and interesting. I started thinking… what could…
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Tech Salaries: All that goes up, must come down
This content was originally posted as a thread on Twitter: https://twitter.com/StCyrThoughts/status/1458802830484119561 Some folks are mad about this tweet by @laurieontech but it is important to understand what happened in our field’s history. I saw this as I was starting into tech. Telecom companies drastically cutting staff after years of booming,…
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4 speaker tips to focus on your camera while recording a video
I’m not sure about everybody else, but since we’ve switched to doing a lot of virtual events I have really noticed how easily distracted my eyes are while I’m presenting. It’s important for engaging with your audience to make eye contact with the camera, but keeping focus on the camera…
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An exciting day for me as the Developer Portal launched!
My team has been working on this one for a while, so I was really proud of the work done here to build a great experience for developers. It’s just the first version, but there is a lot we can do to make it easier and better for developers to…
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Building a timeline with Polywork
So a little while back, a member of the DevRel community made me aware of a new social platform called Polywork. I wasn’t sure what to make of it at first, or how to best use it, but I decided that for me I wanted to use it as a…
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How do I get a notification when my Vercel deployment fails?
My team was working on a project together and getting lots of ‘bot’ emails from our GitHub integration to Vercel. At least, we were getting emails when the build and deploy succeeded to Vercel. But what about when the deployment fails? Everything looked fine locally, the site was working, but…
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I’m fine. How are you?
“Hi there, how are you?”“Fine, how are you?”“Fine, thank you.” I’ve seen this play out as some sort of passphrase to start a conversation. It seems people can’t get started without the secret social handshake. But nobody wants to hear the real answer to that question. I’m a little tired…
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How to add your PowerPoint presentation to your camera with OBS
Have you ever wanted an “over the shoulder” feel to your video presentation? Like a broadcast news style, right in your web camera? You can add your PowerPoint presentation to your camera feed using OBS software and a few easy steps. You can watch the video to see how, or…
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Saying goodbye to an old friend
It was February 29th, 2020. I received a call from an old bandmate, who now lived in Edmonton. He used to be the lead singer in a band I had formed with friends, over 20 years before that. I hadn’t really seem him in quite a few years, so I…
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St-Cyr 2020: The Hindsight Review
As the new year begins, I took a look back at what I managed to pull off in 2020. This was my first full calendar year managing the Technical Evangelism team at Sitecore, so my way of contributing changed a little bit this year. One of my most proud accomplishments…
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Sitecore software downloads are faster and ungated!
Today on the Tech Marketing blog, I announced that Sitecore has made a big change to dev.sitecore.net. The downloads are now hosted via CDN, making it available globally at much faster download speeds than was previously possible. Along with this change? NO MORE ACCESS RESTRICTIONS! You don’t have to login,…
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Baby Steps to Metrics – Starting your content analytics
Hi there and welcome back to the Baby Steps to Metrics series! At this point in our story we started small with a few numbers by counting things done by the team. However, like I’ve said before, counting things is a pretty terrible metric overall. We need to start seeing…
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4 Baby Steps to getting started with metrics
I find getting started on things is one of the hardest things to do. When I started into looking at metrics, there were a lot of great examples of end results and amazing dashboards, but nobody yet mapping out how to get there. This quick primer gives you a background…
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Sitecore 10 benefits for Content Strategists and Digital Marketers
Everything brands need to deliver and evolve experiences in a fully integrated solution. Adapt quickly based on contextual insights through Horizon and deploy data-informed updates or new experience elements faster than ever before. If you want a quick overview of the whole release, check out Sitecore 10 Highlights article. In…
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Sitecore 10 benefits for Developers, DevOps and IT
Deliver more rapidly to accelerate digital experience success with new features — from container infrastructure orchestration to integrated data and marketing functionality. If you want a quick overview of the whole release, check out Sitecore 10 highlights article. In the following article, we’re going to drill down into the changes…
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Sitecore 10 highlights
With the release of Sitecore 10 there are enhancements and innovations that help create efficiencies for both Marketing and IT teams – providing tools that help teams launch and evolve unique experiences that drive successful engagements. “With Sitecore 10.0, the focus has been on new innovations for usability, accelerated time…
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Baby Steps for Metrics – DevRelCon Earth 2020
My slides for my talk at DevRelCon Earth 2020 are now posted online on Notist. Got questions on getting started with your DevRel reporting? Let me know! UPDATE (November 2020) The video recording of the presentation is now available on the DevRel YouTube channel. Baby Steps for Metrics DevRelCon Earth…
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Should I #DockerAllTheThings?
A while back I was in a discussion about whether there was a benefit for all organizations to adopt Docker. I was of the opinion that there are scenarios where it just wasn’t a fit. The more I thought about this, the more I realized that the benefits are always…
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DevRel metrics – Counting things is terrible. Do it!
Upon seeing some activity numbers from a recent quarter, a leader I respect told me “I know everybody is busy.” They wanted to know what the impact of our activity was, not how much we did. Of course! Anybody talking to you about metrics tells you that counting things is…
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So you work from home now…
With the current pandemic a lot of people are now working from home full-time and we all need to adjust to a new way of balancing work and life. Not only that, we are not having a normal “work-from-home” situation. This is a “work-from-home-while-living-through-a-pandemic-that-can-potentially-wipe-out-the-family” situation. So there are a few…
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Sitecore and SameSite=Lax cookies
The SameSite cookie changes that seem to be breaking all those integrations on your web pages are intended to better protect against CSRF attacks. But does this impact the cookies that Sitecore generates? YES IT DOES! Read more on the Technical Marketing blog…
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DevRel metrics – Which video in a series is the best performer?
When working with a technical audience, we create a lot of content in a variety of ways: documentation, blogs, presentations, and videos. Some people learn best by watching somebody else do something, or explain a concept with visuals. As we create this type of content, we need to be able…
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Should we host Sitecore on IaaS or PaaS? (Jan 2020)
This started as a question on the community forums, and my answer got so long I decided to capture it here as well. In general, when you are choosing an infrastructure model the first question you need to ask is what your team is comfortable having responsibility over, and what…
St-Cyr Thoughts 