The pre-party
This was a great opportunity to start with, to be able to see what the Umbraco HQ looks like and get talking to other Umbracians in an informal environment, loosened up by some alcohol.
I met so many people who I recognised from the Our Umbraco forum, twitter and Slack group. This online community was coming together in one place to have a drink and a chat in person. It was the perfect start and it set the tone for the whole event.
The HQ is in a strange building with a big engine in it, it's like a museum for some kind of industrial engine. At the front is an open plan office on 3 levels, up a few steps towards the middle is the engine room where the bar was, and down the stairs behind and below the engine room was a conference room and the toilets. As seems to be the way with Umbraco, there were lots of inflatable unicorns and funny signs to decorate the place. It looked like a fun place to work and was definitely a great place to have the pre-party.
There was a free bar in the engine room and on the floor around the front office were lots of chilled containers, containing all of the beer pull requests sent in from Umbracians from around the world.
Day 1
The day started early with registration from 8:00 ready for the key not to start at 9:00
Some people were worse for wear that morning, thankfully I wasn't hungover at all. I needed to be fresh for the keynote speech.
People starting to sit down for the keynote speech
V8
Umbraco v7 is very stable and mature right now. Whilst there are some security patches and minor improvements being added to it, there's not a great deal to add to it. They are paving the way for v8 to come out. It is currently being worked on full time by Shannon and Stephan. It's a lot more streamlined, modular and testable.
We were told about v8. It is now available in preview mode. So it's not an Alpha or a Beta, but it is available for us to try out and give feedback on. It is a cleaner codebase, because they have removed the legacy code. It has better multi-lingual options built into it. It won't run on .NET Core yet, but with a cleaner codebase it will make it easier to do when the time comes.
Umbraco Headless
Umbraco Headless is going to be released as a commercial SaaS product. You will have the power and backoffice of Umbraco, coupled with the API endpoints to make it a great headless CMS solution. This can be used to power chat bots, amazon/cortana skills, mobile apps etc. The opportunities are endless. Earlier this year, I used the Umbraco Headless API to create a content managed React website.
Latch
Umbraco is now a sponsor of LetsEncrypt at the same level as Facebook. This means that on Umbraco Cloud you can now get a free SSL certificate. What is even better, is the fact that they will automatically renew the LetsEncrypt certificate for you, so you are protected without any extra cost and without the worry of the certificate expiring. That's the beauty of Latch.