CIRCUIT 2015 Wrap-Up

Well, it’s been a week since ICF Interactive hosted CIRCUIT, our AEM Developer conference sponsored by Adobe. It was a great event, a great crowd, and our speakers, party locations, and engagement were above and beyond. Our Twitter hashtag #CIRCUIT15 got lots of exercise and helped spark conversations about AEM locally and nationally throughout the conference.

THANKS

We’d like to thank Adobe for helping sponsor this event and for their team of developers, managers, and product owners that joined the conference and provided us all with some incredibly valuable knowledge around the AEM platform.

The Adobe community strikes me as a uniquely passionate one; the level of detail, the driving questions, even the tightly-held opinions of developers using and challenging the platform “by making extensions, plug-ins, and components for it” they all speak to the energy and zeal that lives inside this community.

ACHIEVEMENTS

–And what a platform to create that community around. Adobe, and AEM in particular, doesnít shy away from community and user feedback. Each day at CIRCUIT, Adobe presenters were giving sessions on new features (Grid-based layouts in 6.1), best practices (10 Things Apache Sling Can Do…), and then answering questions about the benefits or obstacles for each item they presented, taking suggestions on what might work better for the developer community at large, and listening to what is wanted next (or in a more demanding way, now) from developers.

Whatever Adobe is doing, it’s working. They were recently named as a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management, not long after the announcement of their leadership status with Gartner for Mobile App Development Platforms. These accolades are impressive, and they only further our belief that Adobe is an enterprise content management solution that can solve many of the problems our clients face in today’s changing digital landscape.

Our speakers this year presented on a wide range of topics — from Dev Ops to Front End, Mobile challenges, Apps, and UIs and APIs. Each session proved that there is always something new to learn and there are ways to improve upon development.

Two new open source projects were released by ICF developers at the conference, an occasion we always look forward to as our internal team is constantly finding ways to innovate and increase efficiency. Have a look here for Front End tool Iron(Fe) and here for Mainstay, the broker between Iron(Fe) and your AEM authored components.

(LITERAL) TAKE AWAYS

As we take a slow exhale after the fun and education of CIRCUIT, we know the next inhale is going to be planning CIRCUIT 2016 and making sure we continue to raise our game. This year’s breakout DevOps sessions, App development, and thoughtful topics like best practices for authoring component dialogs set a high bar for next year’s session submissions. If you missed CIRCUIT 2015 and can’t wait for 2016, head over to Slideshare to see many of our presentation decks. In the coming weeks full A/V of CIRCUIT sessions will be made available as well.

I’m thrilled to be a part of such an intelligent, passionate, opinionated AEM community and am looking forward to contributing to it every year by way of CIRCUIT.