One Year Later: I didn’t just change jobs, I changed how I think about content

It's been a long time in this blog since the last post. I think it's a good time to wrap it up since I've left Sitecore and joined Sanity almost a year ago. I'm still happy to share knowledge about Sitecore when asked on Twitter or Slack, but for this blog it is likely the last post.

Many people have asked how is it going and how big of a change it was. Well, there are two parts to it, or maybe even three?

The first and the foremost is the culture

Sanity is unique in a way that it has gathered amazingly smart colleagues who are also nice and friendly. I think this is where Sitecore compromised and cracked - in a rush to grow the headcount, it hired hundreds, prioritizing quantity over quality, and that started long before it replaced even more people in Canada/Denmark/Ukraine with cheap labour in Sri Lanka this year.

The second is the product

Many companies claim that they're more than CMS, that they don't have a vendor lock-in, etc. But Sanity really is. The idea that your content is at the core is a game changer in many ways. You don't define templates and fields in Sanity. You have your content in a JSON format, and you put it into Sanity as is, you get it from Sanity as is. There is simply nothing proprietary about how the content is stored, it is JSON, that's it. You can build a rich UI on top of it, or you might not. Sort of the same idea I had back in 2017 when I built https://www.jsonstorage.net, just on a much much larger scale and super rich feature set on top.

The third one is being cloud-native

I really enjoy working with a product where the second the feature gets released - all customers have it. Going from all-Microsoft and C# to all-Google and Go was interesting, but it sort of started with learning Kubernetes/Linux years ago, and I enjoy the dev tooling and lightweight containers.

To sum it up

It's been great and I highly recommend Sanity both as a company to work in (and with - remember, if the company cares about its employees, the employees care about customers 😉). 

If you are interested in joining Sanity - check out https://www.sanity.io/careers - not a referral link, we don't get referral bonuses, just genuine recommendation. 

If you are interested in building a holiday hobby project with Sanity (remember, we've got a very generous free tier!) - just create your account and start building - no "get a demo", no "add credit card" to start with.

Happy Holidays everyone and thank you for being a reader of this blog!