Clouds, Unicorns, and Rainbows

Before you say it; “Doesn’t this blog look familiar somehow?”. I know. Ok? I know :-)

While my Blogger based blog “Into The Core” and I go way back, like back to 2005 back, it has not always been a relationship of pure love and merry co-existence.

Blogger has, as you would expect from any service that has been around for almost 20 years, undergone a number of changes over the years. And ever so often this has had subtle yet annoying influence on how my blog there presented itself. Paragraph spacing would sometimes change, leaving my blog posts looking very congested, and forcing me to go back to all of them and redo their formatting. Not cool.

The problem at the core of all this is, of course, that the underlying content in Blogger is stored as HTML. It became clear to me that I wanted to shift onto a blogging platform that was Markdown based. I also wanted full source level control of the content, and I wanted an easy way to move the platform around when - 15 years from now - things will have changed up once again.

Long story short; Kamsar’s post on Hexo made a lot of sense and inspired me to take a closer look at Hexo myself. And here we are. That we also ended up using the same theme (Icarus) for the blog is more due to the fact that I feel it’s the best theme available for Hexo right now, and (probably moreso) that I’m lazy.

The new name?

A generation has passed (ok, an Internet generation perhaps) since I started blogging. The whole IT landscape has changed, not once but many times over. And in this current day and age I guess it should come as no surprise, it’s all about The Cloud. And when it comes to Sitecore this primarily revolves around Azure, PaaS, and everything that comes with it.

All of this, much as I hate to admit it, has sort of rebooted a large part of what I used to “know” and take for granted. When it comes to deploying a multi-server Sitecore solution to Azure that scales across the globe - I’m as much on page 1 as everyone else. Maybe page 2, but you get my meaning.

As I form experience and in the event I feel I can add something valuable to the ongoing conversation about Sitecore in the Cloud, I feel this new blog and platform is a more appropriate base for future blog posts.

But why now?

I don’t blog a whole lot any more. I’ve found other ways to put my knowledge and experience to use, and where there used to be only a handful of us back in 2005 there are now a literal forest of active bloggers out there writing and sharing - which is excellent, of course :-) But these days I only blog when I have something on my mind that I feel is not getting covered (enough) elsewhere. Otherwise I dedicate my time on:

1. The Sitecore Stack Exchange - of which I am a co-founder and co-moderator.
2. The Sitecore Slack Community - Where thousands of active Sitecore community members hang out daily.
3. Read more about our community Slack in Jammykam’s excellent introduction Sitecore Slack Community Guidelines & Help
4. Sign up for Sitecore Slack here https://www.bit.ly/SitecoreSlack
5. And thirdly, the main reason I can no longer postpone having a blogging platform I can live with:

Unicorn & Rainbow

As you may or may not know, Kam Figy - author and creator of many beloved open source tools for the Sitecore platform, recently started working for the Mothership where he is now focused on building cool things that will eventually make all of us back-end developers unemployed ;-)

But cool things such as JSS, a whole new career focus, and the fact that time may very well be relative but not so much for us mere Earthlings, has left Kam pressed for time. He asked me, and I accepted, to become a co-pilot on the Unicorn and Rainbow projects.

Co-pilot, mind you. Kam is by no means gone from these projects and I bear no illusion that I could just jump onboard and start filling out those shoes entirely on my own. But it means that I am doing most of the day-to-day and, over time, will be adding more of my own footprint to these projects. I have had nothing but love for Unicorn since I first came across it in 2014.

And Unicorn continues to be my number 1 choice on Sitecore solutions to this day. Now - almost 4 years later - Unicorn has grown from being relatively obscure to becoming a household name in Sitecore solutions across the world. Thousands and thousands of downloads.

I still remember exactly why I fell in love with Unicorn, and why that is still the case to this day. While co-piloting this project, I will keep staying true to that legacy and still work to find ways to improve and better the project for all of us to enjoy.

I certainly have my work cut out for me :-)