Umbraco Spark

“Umbraco Spark innovation conference is a must for all Umbraco developers that want to find out what's going on with Umbraco. Focusing on development, innovation and forward-thinking.   

                           

Last week some of the Brace Digital team travelled far and wide to spend a couple of days attending the Umbraco Spark Innovation Conference. We were so excited to be able to attend and take full advantage of being with our Umbraco community friends and colleagues!

For one of our web developers Aimee this was her first time attending an Umbraco conference so we decided to sit down with her and get her thoughts on it!

On March 9^th I started my travels to Bristol from Glasgow for Umbraco Spark. After a few hours delay I finally made it into Bristol city centre to meet the Team at Framework Co-working space. We spent the rest of the afternoon working, chatting, and taking advantage of the free tea/coffee in the space. Since we all work remotely, it was nice to be all in one room together working.

After checking into the hotel, we all met up in the reception that evening to go out for a team meal. Stable Pizza was the restaurant of choice, the menu was very interesting and there were many cool choices and concoctions of pizza to get. I opted for a classic pepperoni with caramelised onions and tenderstem broccoli! Dinner was filled with chats mostly about favourite movies and shocking movies that some people haven’t seen yet.     

Once dinner was completed, we then headed to the Spark pre-party at Par59. We headed up to the main room and it was packed. As we made our way in the other members of the team were greeted with some familiar faces and I was introduced to some people in the Umbraco community. It was a good chance to network with some other developers in the space. The night continued with some drinks, crazy golf, and a hole in one by yours truly and ended with more socialising with everyone at the pre-party.

The next day started bright and early with some hotel breakfast before we headed over to the M Shed to check into the event. After grabbing our welcome packs, saying hi to a few people and grabbing a cup of tea, we headed to the main hall for the welcome talk. The welcome was followed by a talk from Jacob and Lasse from Umbraco talking about “The New Backoffice of Umbraco”. This talk was very interesting as it highlighted the new technologies used in the CMS as well as some new features and some front-end specific changes. I mostly stayed in track 2 throughout the day which involved many fascinating talks and case studies about choosing the right technologies for a project, how to upgrade Umbraco versions and exploring AI to name a few. In between the talks was filled with snacks, chatting and networking with people in the community and making many trips to the merch table to grab some free t-shirts, stickers, and pens.

My brain was exploding with all the new information I was taking in. I learnt a lot of new things and felt very motivated by the end of the day to create an Umbraco project and try out all the new features myself. The day ended at 5pm and I headed to the airport to catch my flight back home. Overall, it was an amazing experience, and I can’t wait to immerse myself in the Umbraco community and hopefully attend many other conferences with my team.

Wow sounds like you had a great time! Attending conferences such as Umbraco Spark is very important to us as a web development agency. As your Umbraco specialists its important we’re always up to date with the latest Umbraco news and features, and technology.

We are always keen to get involved with the Umbraco community as much as we can, and we’re looking forward to getting involved with Umbraco CodeGarden in June 2023.

See you next time, Umbraco Spark!