Recently I came across the AEM Developer Series posted by Anirudh Sharma at https://aem.redquark.org/2018/10/day-00-aem-developer-series.html; it’s a great resource and gives you as a developer a good introduction what you are likely to do when you want to start a career in AEM development.

Nevertheless, this tutorial focusses purely on development tasks. This is a good approach when you are a junior developer. If you are familiar with Java and assigned to a project together with more senior and experienced developers and a good architect, it’s a good start. Because in such a situation, you are told what to do. Others do the relevant decisions like

• Is this a new component? Or a variation of an existing component?
• Should we create a new template or not?
• Can we reuse or re-purpose an out-of-the-box feature of AEM? Or shoukd we create that on our own?
• How do structure the content?

And many questions more. And that is good, because you as a junior developer can learn a lot from others.

But it has one downside: You hardly known the product “AEM”, but are only interested in extension points and APIs you can use. A good example is Anirudh’s series I mentioned above: It just focusses on how to develop stuff, on APIs which exist for years. Yes, that’s natural for a development course 🙂

But you as a developer will never see what’s a already there!  You are likely to ignore all the new feature which have been added since AEM 6.0; sincet that time I see a shift in product development from providing a framework towards more ready-to-use features.

For example the “projects” feature: There is much APIs, but most of that stuff is actually creating the right JCR structures. I see it rarely used. For many developers (people which are in the ecosystem for 10 years alike as for people just started; and ) the major and sometimes only concepts they use are pages, components and assets. Regarding Content Fragments and Experience Fragments the situation seems a bit better, maybe these have been communicated and marketed better. But whenever a new requirement is raised, the immedate reaction of an experienced developers often looks like this: How can we make this happen with pages, assets, components and dialogs? Instead of asking yourself “Is there something in product which we can reuse or customize?” This question should come up much more often.  And yes, I am guilty as well.

Using new features, understanding their capabilities and their weaknesses should be as common to any more experienced AEM developer as knowing that you should close a ResourceResolver (sorry, couldn’t help myself :-))

So my recommendation to all of you who think of AEM 6.5 just as much more stable and performant AEM 5.6.1 with deprecated ClassicUI: It is, but also much more. Walk through the release notes and documentation, check for the new features, work with the tutorials and watch the videos. There are a lot of hidden gems which are good to know, and in the right situation it can be the solution to your development problem. Or at least help you to reduce effort.
Just relying on the JCR API, Sling Resources, Servlets and the Edit mode might be absolutely future proof, but why do you use AEM then?

So for any AEM junior developer: Next to your technical enablement: Try to understand what’s in the product. Work with authors, test the user interface, check the documentation; and maybe attend the user training. And be curious!