WHO IS JOHN WEST?

His interest in computers began in the mid-1980s on the Commodore VIC-20. Regardless of the different jobs John West has held throughout the years, he considers his role to be Chief Customer Advocate — professionally consulting on platform selection and solution implementation, supporting developers in implementing maintainable, scalable, usable and high-performance CMS solutions.

West has been thinking about, blogging about, and debating the finer points of CMS since the early 2000s. Here are some highlights of his full work history:

• In the late 1990s, using mainly Solaris, Oracle, and C++, West implemented systems that automated diverse business processes responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars in transactions annually.
• In 2000, West began consulting using the TeamSite Content Management System (CMS) and soon began using their C# and .NET before joining Sitecore in 2004.
• At Sitecore, West assisted with sales, provided tech support, taught training, and eventually wrote over 500 blog posts and a book about Sitecore.
• After Sitecore, he worked with various CMS vendors, several system integrators and for multiple customers, implementing complex solutions with Content Management Systems.

West’s vast experience integrating countless upstream and downstream systems across all verticals has given him a broad understanding of customer requirements and application architectures. He experienced an aha moment while evaluating vendors for a systems integrator in 2019. Because he wasn’t a JavaScript developer, he had largely ignored the trend towards headless content management — until he encountered Contentstack and its key differentiators that set it apart from the competition.

Headless CMS and Contentstack got West excited about technology again. In Contentstack, he has found a platform that he considers superior to .NET or any other SaaS headless CMS. The following are his blogs, his words, exactly as written.