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Knut Melvær

Knut runs developer relations at Sanity.io

knut@sanity.io
www.knutmelvaer.no
Oslo, Norway
Joined: May 2017
Head of Developer Relations

Latest contributions

Headless CMS explained in 1 minute
Article

Learn about headless Content Management Systems: what they are, how they work, and how they differ from traditional CMSes like WordPress.

Knut Melvær

Harm reduction for developer relations teams
Blog post

We want to make sure that our devrel team is safe and is able to enjoy their work teaching and learning in public. Unfortunately, this doesn't come without risk, especially if you are non-male and non-white. Here are 7 ways we have started to approach harm reduction for developer relations at Sanity.

Knut Melvær

Hierarchies, Graphs, and Navigation
Guide

Hierarchies are handy for organizing, but they can also fence you in. Learn how to build them, when to use them, and why you might want to treat navigation as a separate concern.

Breaks for Portable Text
Schema

How to add different types of “breaks” for Portable Text that can be translated to horizontal rules, “read more”, sections, chapters, and so on.

Knut Melvær

Podcast
Schema

Schemas for running a podcast backend on Sanity.io

Knut Melvær

Deciding on fields and relationships
Guide

Official

How to work through tricky content questions and build structures that will stand the test of time.

Community Digest: 2020 highlights
Blog post

Looking back at last year, here's some great projects and contributions from the Sanity.io developer community.

Query your data inside VS Code
Blog post

Get syntax highlighting and query execution for GROQ with the Sanity.io extension for VS Code.

Knut Melvær

Sanity.io on the Google Cloud Platform podcast
Blog post

Listen to the episode of the GCP podcast where Simen and Knut tell about the origin of Sanity.io and they see it something more than a headless CMS.

Knut Melvær

Community Digest: Summer Edition Part 1
Blog post

In this chunky summer edition of the community digest, we present the first part of all the projects that have been launched with Sanity and shared with us in the #i-made-this channel in our community slack.

Knut Melvær

Why content modeling early unlocks value
Blog post

Content modeling early in the lifecycle of a project is really valuable. Learn how to apply it to projects young and old, tricks for modeling with legacy software, and advice for considering CMS migrations.

How to Make Taxonomy Pages With Gatsby and Sanity.io
Guide

Official

In this tutorial, we’ll cover how to make taxonomy pages with Gatsby with structured content from Sanity.io.

css-tricks.com
Knut Melvær

Community Digest #20
Blog post

Websites for Nick Offerman, Michiganian drone shows, Deno gists, and bespoke e-commerce built under 20 hours. We got it all in this week’s communiy digest!

Knut Melvær

Community Digest #19
Blog post

This week, we bring GROQ to Gatsby, tip-of-the-week, a deep dive into blog design, a new game for Amazon Alexa, and other new projects launched with Sanity!

Knut Melvær

Community Digest #18
Blog post

We‘re back again with a bunch of highlights and new projects launched in the Sanity community. From stolen CSS to artful portfolios.

Knut Melvær

How to create a custom asset source plugin for Sanity Studio
Guide

Official

In this tutorial, you will learn how to make a custom asset source plugin that uses the webcam to insert a photo in the Sanity Studio’s image field.

www.youtube.com
Knut Melvær

Community Digest #17
Blog post

We have found our way on to Twitch! Upcoming online events. Maps, serverless SEO, TypeScript, and a bunch of new apps and sites launched with Sanity.io.

Knut Melvær

How we manage community support with Sanity
Blog post

We are making the code for our community management studio and Slack integration public. It‘s also a story about how structured content can be used to power organizational processes, and not just websites.

Using Sanity for image art direction
Guide

Official

Five cool image tricks that you can achieve with Sanity

css-tricks.com
Knut Melvær

Community Digest #16
Blog post

Here's the highlights and new projects launched with Sanity this week: New intros, clients, and content modelling resources.

Knut Melvær

Community Digest #15
Blog post

We're back from Easter holiday with new content and projects from the Sanity community: Live-streams, guides, nifty widgets, creative sites, and a wine-lottery app.

Knut Melvær

Community Digest #14
Blog post

Get a head start on your next Shopify and Gatsby e-commerce project, as well as a craving for plums, new Vue and TypeScript integrations, and new themes for Sanity Studio.

Knut Melvær

Community Digest #13
Blog post

We're back with yet another community digest. This week, there's a lot of visually creative sites, an introduction to content modelling, and a nifty new plugin for complex GROQ queries.

Knut Melvær

Recreating the CodePen Gutenberg Embed Block for Sanity.io
Guide

Official

Learn how to create a custom CodePen block with a preview for Sanity Studio, inspired by Chris Coyier’s implementation for Wordpress’ Gutenberg editor.

css-tricks.com
Knut Melvær

Community Digest #12: Let us have a dugnad
Blog post

In this week’s community digest, we dedicate some space for projects related to the COVID-19 pandemic, some working from home advice, and of course, new projects launched with Sanity. And the technologist profile featuring Kelly Quantrill.

Knut Melvær

Community Digest #11: E-commerce, women in tech, and hackathons
Blog post

Most of us have spent the last weeks adjusting to the COVID-19 outbreak in some way or another. With everything that is happening, it still good to have something that's “business as usual.” So here's a new community digest, with community highlights, new launches, and a developer profile.

Knut Melvær

Community Digest #10: Anti-siloing, onboarding, and some praise
Blog post

Don't start with the site map, start with structured content. How to onboard clients to their new content management. A bunch of new site launchese. We share some praise. And a new developer profile; this week, Holly!

Knut Melvær

How To Make A Speech Synthesis Editor
Guide

Official

Learn how to make a What You Get Is What You Hear (WYGIWYH) editor for speech synthesis using Sanity.io’s editor for Portable Text.

www.smashingmagazine.com
Knut Melvær

Deploying Sanity Studio with Vercel
Guide

Official

This guide will walk you through how to deploy Sanity Studio with Vercel in three simple steps.

vercel.com
Knut Melvær

Introducing the Sanity source plugin for Gridsome
Blog post

With our new source plugin for the Vue.js based static site generator Gridsome, you can now build fast by default websites powered by structured content. The plugin gives you fast and frugal builds. With watchMode you get low latency real-time content previews while you develop, without having to save or publish.

Sanity.io User Group London: E-commerce and rapid prototyping
Blog post

We had the first London-based Sanity.io User Group meetup at Moving Brands’ quarters. MB’s Toby Milner-Gullard talk about how they used Sanity from prototype to production, and Rupert Dunk showed us how to do a e-commerce platform from scratch using Sanity and some few dedicated services.

Knut Melvær

Videos from our online meetup are up!
Blog post

We had a blast hanging out with everyone who came to Sanity.io’s online meetup. Now the videos are up for those of you that didn't get to be there.

Knut Melvær

Join our Online Summer Meetup on June 11th!
Blog post

Join us for our Online Summer Meetup, June 11th. State of Sanity; How prima.co was built; Gridsome source plugin; What we have been working on.

Knut Melvær

Internal and external links
Guide

Official

How make internal and external links with Portable Text and render them in frontends

Knut Melvær

How to configure schemas
Guide

Official

A video on how to customize the schemas in a Sanity Studio

Knut Melvær

How to quickly set up a Gatsby.js JAMstack website with a headless CMS
Blog post

We built a Gatsby.js example that ships with a Sanity.io editing environment. Here’s how to set it up with your own content, modify the look-and-feel with realt-time previews, and deploy on Netlify or Zeit’s Now.

Knut Melvær

Sanity.io on the devmode.fm podcast
Blog post

Our developer advocate Knut Melvær appeared on the devmode.fm podcast and talked Sanity.io with Andrew Welch, Patrick Harrington, and Lauren Dorman

Knut Melvær

How we blog
Blog post

In this post we give a quick summary of how, where, and why we blog at Sanity.io.

Knut Melvær

Mux input
Tool

Featured

Upload videos to Mux directly from the studio.

First class responsive video support with the new Mux plugin
Blog post

When building Sanity, we placed much emphasis on building out a super flexible image pipeline that can transform and re-crop your images for you. We have no ambition of doing the same for video.

Knut Melvær

Indexing in Algolia using serverless functions (and observables!)
Blog post

With Sanity’s powerful export API it's easy to make a small serverless function in order to index all your content in Algolia for the times you want to harness its search capabilities. It's also a nice way to learn about observables in JavaScript.

Knut Melvær

Getting started with Sanity as a headless CMS
Blog post

Sanity is the perfect companion for when you want to get started with the JAMstack, or just need API for your project. In this tutorial you’ll learn how to get started with using Sanity — from configuring the React editor with JavaScript, to querying the API and migrating the content datasets.

Knut Melvær

Headless CMS explained in 1 minute
Blog post

Learn about headless Content Management Systems: what they are, how they work, and how they differ from traditional CMSes like WordPress. We explore the uses of headless content, and how to apply it to websites, apps, and more.

Knut Melvær

Webamp
Tool

Studio v2

Run a Winamp port in your studio!

Knut Melvær

Podcast content schema
Tool

Studio v2

Podcast plugin for Sanity that creates schemas for podcasts and episodes with necessary iTunes data. Make as many podcasts with as many episodes as you want.

Knut Melvær

3 simple things in GROQ to supercharge your frontends
Blog post

GROQ is Sanity’s graph-oriented query language. It lets you do rapid development with structured content. As soon as you create a document on the backend, you can instantly query it. Here's 3 simple things you can do in GROQ to get you started.

Knut Melvær

Read about Sanity.io’s image pipeline in CSS-tricks
Blog post

We wrote a post on CSS-tricks, with live code examples on Codepen, on how to use this metadata that’s applied to images in Sanity. We're pretty pleased with it!

Knut Melvær

How to structure your code repository in a Sanity.io project
Blog post

You have started a Sanity project and have configured your schemas and published some content to the API. You are now ready to make a frontend, and app, or a service that takes use of it. But how to structure your code?

Knut Melvær

About Knut

Knut has written code for the web since the early 2000s. Knut has a background in the digital humanities and has worked in the intersection between user experience design and technology. He has also been a columnist, speaker, and university lecturer.

Knut joined Sanity in 2018 as their Head of Developer Relations, and has since grown the developer community, made educational content, and much more.

Knut cares a lot about making technology and programming understandable and accessible to anyone, not just developers.

Expertise