Last week, Rick, Alex, and Nurhak had the pleasure of attending the Umbraco UK Festival and Partner Summit, organised by the Umbraco UK Foundation and Umbraco HQ.
The Umbraco UK Festival, a non-profit event organised by the UK Umbraco Foundation brings together the Umbraco community for fantastic talks, workshops, and a hackathon and the Umbraco Business Summit gets business leaders, Umbraco customers and partners together to learn about the future of Umbraco, share strategies and network. Read on for Nurhak's experience of the festival!
The day before the Umbraco UK Festival, there was the UK Partner Summit and a Community Hackathon organised by Umbraco HQ. Alex and I attended the UK Partner Summit this year and we spent a fantastic day with experts from Umbraco HQ and the wider Umbraco Community. Following the welcome sessions hosted by Bolett Kern, Product Manager from Umbraco, we met the new Umbraco CEO, Mats Persson, and learnt about the latest state of the UK Umbraco market and the future of Umbraco's partner program. Filip Bech-Larsen, CTO from Umbraco, gave details about the Umbraco Product Roadmap, he specifically gave details about Flexible Environments for Umbraco Cloud, Block Level Variations for Umbraco CMS, Lazy-loaded Content Cache, Reusable Content, External Search Providers, Containerisation, and the latest news on Umbraco products, like Umbraco Engage, Workflow and Commerce. A case study talk followed Umbraco's CTO's talk, where we learned how the Umbraco Cloud platform could provide a sustainable solution for a big organisation in a short timeframe. After the case study talk, there was a "fireside" chat about navigating challenges in the CMS market and an insightful sustainability talk by Professor Mike Berners-Lee about the role of ICT, AI, and energy efficiency in the context of an emerging climate and ecological crisis. After the final talk, I went to an after-party at a club near the venue, where I was joined by Rick Butterfield, and we socialised with other like-minded people.
UK Business Summit
Me and Alex attending the UK Business Summit
Umbraco Hackathon
Rick and I at the UK Fest
Paul talking about CI/CD and Umbraco Cloud
This year's Umbraco UK Festival took place on November 8th in London. It was a well-organised event filled with great talks and people. There were two different tracks of talks and Rick and I split up to benefit from as many talks as possible. Welcome talk followed by a great sustainability talk Callum Whyte, one of the organisers of the main event did the welcome talk. He gave us numbers about how the Umbraco community has grown over the past years. Asim Hussain then showed us how the Impact Framework could be used to quantify the environmental impact of a software app. Unlocking Sustainability with Static Site Generation and Composable Architecture Marcin Zajkowski discussed how to combine modern, dynamic design and complex business requirements with a lightweight and dev-friendly implementation. He explored a preprocessed and statically generated site using the latest version of Umbraco CMS and a content federation layer, such as Enterspeed. Fast-track to Customising Umbraco's Backoffice Lotte Pitcher from Umbraco HQ's gave a practical talk about how to easily customise the new Umbraco backoffice. Lotte shared her experience with creating custom dashboards while showing us some shortcuts to achieve our goals quickly.
Next-Generation AI for Developers
Henk Boelman from Microsoft delivered an insightful talk on advanced AI language models, including GPT-4o, AI Studio, and Microsoft's Copilot. He demonstrated how to easily train an AI model with data and use it to create an application. Simplifying Umbraco Cloud Deployments with CI/CD Paul Seal is a prominent member of the Umbraco community, known for his numerous contributions, and he delivered a practical talk at this year's festival about integrating Azure DevOps CI/CD pipelines with Umbraco Cloud. This integration allows us to continue our usual practices, such as pull requests and code reviews, whilst working efficiently with Umbraco Cloud. Automating Content Creation for Umbraco Events with OpenAI Phil Whittaker's talk was about how he created his app to easily generate various local Umbraco meetup pages as well as friendly social media announcements. It was yet another example of how to use AI to automate daily tasks. Build your own Umbraco Copilot A great talk from Callum Whyte outlined how to use AI to automate Umbraco tasks, like creating Umbraco document types, creating content, and searching for content or media using AI. Umbraco Product Update and Networking The final talk of the day was by Bolette Kern from Umbraco HQ and illustrated the latest features of Umbraco products as well as planned features.
We enjoyed learning new things while exchanging ideas with incredibly smart individuals in the friendly Umbraco community. Everything was well-organised, and the presentations were excellent. Additionally, both Rick and I won some prizes — Rick won an Umbraco t-shirt, and I won a friendly Umbraco axe! Big thanks to everyone who was involved in organising and hosting these events and we are already looking forward to the next one. #h5yr
Callum and UK Fest prizes
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