Last week I presented at one of the largest developer conferences in the world; Next.js Conf. The video is now available on Youtube.
Stand up a commerce storefront in 5 minutes
In this session, we’re going to build a storefront using Next.js Commerce powered by Sitecore OrderCloud, an API-first headless commerce platform.
Join this end-to-end demo highlighting the amazing developer experience and ease of use of the Next.js Commerce starterkit, in combination with Sitecore OrderCloud and Vercel.
From the setup of your dev environment, all the way to deploying and updating the environment hosted on Vercel.
The recordings of the SUGCON event are now available including the keynote that Jason and I delivered on Friday morning.
Session outline
Composable DXP is all the rage, but what if you already have a platform installation with years of investment into getting it just how you like? How do you gradually move your architecture over to something that is MACH and headless? Do you need a full rebuild? Do you need Next.js or not? Where does content go now? What are the benefits and downsides?
Pieter Brinkman (@pieterbrink123) and Jason St-Cyr (@StCyrThoughts) take an overview of a few XM and XP scenarios and how you can gradually migrate to a composable architecture, along with some of the advantages and disadvantages of different options.
Composable DXP is all the rage. Why is the industry moving towards SaaS and Composable architecture? What are the benefits of composable for customers? And is composable for everyone. These are all questions that are addressed in the Architecture guide to SaaS video.
Next to that we’re also addressing that the actual migration. What if you already have a platform installation with years of investment into getting it just how you like? How do you gradually move your architecture over to something that is MACH and headless? Do you need a full rebuild?
A lot of activities around my job and hobbies are not easy to share. I don’t like sharing to much activities on LinkedIn and I don’t want to write an article on everything. It just takes to much time.
A teammember pointed me to Polywork.com (Thanks Jason). I’m really enjoying Polywork, it’s a easy way to share short updates. I’ve chosen to share updates around work and personal passions, including hobbies like Surfing and BBQ.
You can find my timeline in the op menu or using the link below:
This article will provide you with a walkthrough on how you can build a water usage meter sensor that integrates with your Home Assistant for under 10 $/EURO without the need for any soldering or coding skills.
This article will also cover the configuration that’s needed in Home Assistants to translate the ‘pulse’ to liters (or any other non-metric measurement) in Home Assistant. In the end you will have clear insights in how much water you are using per day, hour, and week.
Why do you want to measure water usage of your home?
These days it’s all about insights. I measure pretty much all my utilities, including power and city heating. The last missing piece is water usage. Although the water in the Netherlands is not really expensive, I wanted to get more insights into how much water we are using and if there is any way to save some water. Unfortunately, water delivery doesn’t come with a smart meter. There’s just an analog counter. So how do you measure the water usage and make this analog meter smart?
See water usage in the Home Assistant Energy Dashboard
The 2022.11 release of Home Assistant added the option to track water usage in the Home Assistant Energy dashboard. The ESPhome configuration has been updated to support this feature. Thanks to MJV for sharing his configuration on the Home Assistant forums.
Some places in the Netherlands have city heating. The intention is to reuse warmth from industry to heat your houses and get warm water. In theory this is a very nice system, but in real world this provides pure vendor lock in, as you can’t switch vendor. This makes city heating very expensive for the consumer. Also most of the warmth is not generated by (green) industry residual warmth but generated by burning gas, biomass and other fuels. So not really a green solution. But enough about my complaints about city heating. More important: how can you read the values and get insights of your usage.
The idea of a smart home is not to only control your home, but also get insights out of your home. A warm home and shower is a crucial for a comfortable day-to-day. It’s also the most one of the biggest costs of living. So we need insights.
Home Assistant has an amazing Energy dashboard, that can also your heating by gas. Unfortunately city heating is not measures with M3 gas but it’s measured measurement called GigaJoule (GJ). So how do we get the energy insights of city heating into Home Assistant?
That’s what I’m going to describe in this article :).
I make a lot of presentations using PowerPoint and I’m also on the receiving end of a lot of presentation.
I truly believe that a good presentations is not made with slides but with a good story and talk track. However, the slides need to be clean and not distracting. One thing that always distracts me is miss alignment of visuals, icons not being centered or columns not evenly distributed.
PowerPoint Align objects functions
PowerPoint has a great feature called Align to help you address this. You can find the Align options under the Arrange button located in the Drawing section underneath the Home Tab.
Using these Align option will save you a lot of time and increase the quality of your presentations. I use these options every day, and unfortunately I couldn’t find a way to access them using keyboard shortcuts. In this post I’ll share the workaround I use to access the align options using keyboard shortcuts.
