Umbraco Together shows strength of community

Umbraco Together, the short-term replacement for the UK flagship conference, made a triumphant return last week, proving again that the community is thriving.

The event comprised a hackathon, an evening meetup and then, on Friday, a series of talks in the heart of the London tech district. dotcentric was invited to Umbraco Together and the Gold Partner Summit, which took place at Hugo & Cat in London.

The hackathon was a well attended part of the event broken into two parts: before lunch we worked independently or on tickets related to the Umbraco core product. At least two pull requests were sent and integrated in the morning alone, which speaks volumes about the core product’s durability and there being fewer obvious bugs to fix.

After lunch, we broke into smaller teams with a general group, CMS, and a third group discussing packages. The general group, which I was part of, worked individually on smaller projects, some doing their own work or contributing to discussions. This included assessing the state of development laptops and their use and purpose (a lot of love was shown for the framework laptops).

On Friday we gathered for talks and found out more about current and future Umbraco developments at the community keynote, where several members of the team spoke to the audience. Umbraco Master & MVP Jason Elkin talked about Playwright (a new and powerful end-to-end testing tool), writing tests and showed how simple and dynamic they are with short demonstrations.

The line-up of speakers, which included Poornima Nayar, Carole Logan and Amanda Brock, demonstrated how much the community has grown, and how diverse it has become.

Umbraco’s decision to focus on the core product and integrations is starting to pay off with the tech partnerships (Dynamics CRM, Shopify and eight other integrations) representing a major step forward.

Umbraco cloud has taken enormous strides too. Work done behind the scenes has led to significant improvements that have allowed it to be opened to data centres in the first instance and soon to other areas. CI/CD will allow control/ownership of your own code, which will help cloud grow enormously.

As an Umbraco Gold Partner, it was as great to get back to being a community and one that is stronger than ever. Thanks to the UK Umbraco Foundation and sponsors EDD London, Vendr, Bump Digital, Equator, Crumpled Dog, and Hugo & Cat. Special mentions to Callum Whyte, Joe Glombek, Jason Elkin & Gillian, Clive and Jeavon from Crumpled Dog who helped make the day a special one!