Inspired by my friend Jeff L’Heureux I decided to share with you, my readers, a quick review about what I had accomplished in 2018. Without a doubt, the most important year so far in my almost 10-year career.

When the year started I had something in mind. Something big and really difficult. I was so happy with my technological skills improvement during the last years that I decided to take a step further and improve, in my opinion, the most important soft skill one can have. I’d like to improve my Presentation skills.

Fortunately, the Sitecore community is so amazing and packed with so many events all over the world that it wasn’t that hard to find those amazing local groups of Sitecore users with the arms open to a newbie like me.

Thank you to every single SUG organizer out there, and a special thank to Jeff L’Heureux, Mike Reynolds and Kamruz Jaman who gave me the initial motivation that I needed. I know that would not be here without you guys.

Presented 7 Talks

• June 13, 2018 – 4th SUGQuebec- Integration Tests Using NightwatchJS
• July 11, 2018 – July Meetup Queen City SUG – Integration Tests Using NightwatchJS
• August 1, 2018 – Sitecore User Group – Minneapolis/St. Paul – Q3 2018 – Automation and Integration Tests Using NightwatchJS
• August 23, 2018 – Ottawa Sitecore User Group – 1st Meetup 2018 –  Automation and Integration Tests Using NightwatchJS
• September 6, 2018 – 6th SUGQuebec – Trucs et Outils Sitecore: Travaillez plus Rapidement
• September 26, 2018 – September Meetup Milwaukee SUG – Automation and Integration Tests Using NightwatchJS
• December 11, 2018 – SUGBrazil – Automation and Integration Tests Using NightwatchJS

Bonus track: I presented the same talk in THREE DIFFERENT LANGUAGES. It was challenging, of course, but it was really fun. I’ll try to do the same next year.

Attended 9 Events

• October 10, 2017 – 3rd Sitecore User Group Quebec – Sitecore 8.2’s Dependency Injection Framework
• June 13, 2018 – 4th SUGQuebec- Integration Tests Using NightwatchJS
• July 11, 2018 – July Meetup Queen City SUG – Integration Tests Using NightwatchJS
• August 1, 2018 – Sitecore User Group – Minneapolis/St. Paul – Q3 2018 – Automation and Integration Tests Using NightwatchJS
• August 7, 2018 – 5th Sitecore User Group Quebec – Sitecore and MVC A-to-Z and Sitecore, The Road to the Cloud
• September 6, 2018 – 6th SUGQuebec – Trucs et Outils Sitecore: Travaillez plus Rapidement
• August 23, 2018 – Ottawa Sitecore User Group – 1st Meetup 2018 –  Automation and Integration Tests Using NightwatchJS
• September 26, 2018 – September Meetup Milwaukee SUG – Automation and Integration Tests Using NightwatchJS
• December 11, 2018 – SUGBrazil – Automation and Integration Tests Using NightwatchJS

Organized 2 Events

• August 7, 2018 – 5th Sitecore User Group Quebec – Sitecore and MVC A-to-Z and Sitecore, The Road to the Cloud
• September 6, 2018 – 6th SUGQuebec – Trucs et Outils Sitecore: Travaillez plus Rapidement

Started My Own Blog

During my SUG trips with my friend Conrad McDougall, we always took the time to meet a few Coveo clients on that region. I think we met at least 20 of them. Not only it was an amazing opportunity to work even more on my presentation game, but those partners had a bunch of unbelievable interesting questions about Sitecore + Coveo.

This inspired me to create my own blog and put there all that useful information that I was sharing with the partners. That’s how coveoticore.wordpress.com was born. And I’m must tell you that I’m really happy with the results. In 6 months, it had 691 views. Not that bad.

• Sitecore 9 And Coveo: Getting Started In 6 Minutes
• Sitecore 9 And Coveo: How To Disable Coveo in 5 Seconds
• Sitecore 9 and Coveo: Diagnostic Page, What Are Those Tests?
• Sitecore, Coveo And SXA: How Should You Use It?
• Sitecore And Coveo: The Layout Was Not Found Error? You Can Fix It In Under 4 Seconds
• Sitecore And Coveo: How to Create a Custom Coveo UI Component?
• Coveo for Sitecore 5: A New Era Has Begun, The Era Of The Command Center. Part I

In parallel to this, I started helping the Coveo for Sitecore users on Sitecore Slack #Coveo and on the Coveo answers portal (21 answers and 25 comments) as much as I can. If you ever have any question about Coveo + Sitecore, feel free to reach us on those channels.

My 2019 Goals

My major goal this year is pretty much the same, I’ll keep presenting as much as I can. Firstly, let’s be honest, because I figured out I like presenting. But secondly and more importantly, I realized that it is an amazing way of meeting new people, and people that are on the same boat. This is priceless…

Since I really like concrete goals, here they are:

• Beat 2018 and present at least 8 times.
• 3 of those must be at new SUGs or events that I never presented before.
• I’ll double the number of blog posts, let’s make it 14 posts.
• I’ll start contributing to an open-source project and have at least 1 PR accepted and merged.
• Keep co-organizing the local SUG where I’m based.