Last week I went to Umbraco Spark with my colleague Joe from ClerksWell.
We met up at my house and took the train together on the Thursday to go to the hackathon.
When we arrived in Bristol, it was a short walk from the train station to the True Digital offices where the hackathon was being hosted. They were lovely offices with lots of room and a gorgeous little dog.
Joe and I both managed to work on a pull request each and by the end of the day we both submitted them.
I'm pleased to say both of them were accepted and merged into the Umbraco code base.
We were well looked after at the hackathon, with snacks, drinks and some lovely burritos for lunch.
After the hackathon, we made our way to our hotel which was another short walk away from the hackathon.
We stayed at the Radisson Blu, which is my favourite one in the area. I've previously stayed at the Ibis and the Mercure Holland.
Before the pre-party we had burgers at a lovely place called Burger Theory, where I had one of the nicest burgers I've ever had.
Lovely burger
The pre-party was great, it was at Roxy Lanes which had all different sports for you to play such as bowling, curling, baseball and pool. I spent half the night networking and the other half playing pool.
The next morning we were up early for a lovely breakfast and a nice walk down to the venue.
Arriving outside the venue
We picked up our swag, I had a genius idea to hang the swag bags on the coat hangers under our coats. You can have that idea for next time.
We got ourselves a coffee and got ready for the opening talk.
Steve gave the opening speech to start the day and it felt great to be back for the 4th time and with around 160 attendees.
A packed main room
The first talk was by Jacob and Lone about the new backoffice in Umbraco 14. There were some technical issues with their laptop which meant I couldn't follow along with what they were trying to tell us, but they did really well to stay composed and keep going.
New Umbraco Backoffice talk
Next Lee Kelleher showed us how he converted one of his packages to work in the new backoffice in Umbraco 14.
Following Lee was Erica Quessenberry who I had never seen give a talk before. Her talk was very insightful and helpful about the relationship between developers and designers and how we can make projects run smoother with some great communication tips.
Lunch was delicious, we did more networking and I met up with the other members of the East Midlands Umbraco Meetup.
Lunch
After lunch I managed to see Matt Brailsford's interesting talk on how he created and maintains umb.fyi
And Pete Duncanson came back to talk to us all about the importance of finding and discussing edge cases with your clients.
In the afternoon break I managed to get a picture with 3 of my best Umbraco friends. We all met at Codegarden 2018 and we have spoken every day online since. This was the first conference that we had all been at, at the same time since then.
Matt Wise, Nik Rimington, Paul Seal, Owain Williams.
I managed to watch 2 more talks before the end, which were by Dan Lister and Joe Glombek.
Dan showed us how the Umbraco Cloud Platform works behind the scenes and Joe talked to us about the importance of writing a good technical question and spotting good answers online.
After all the talks it was great to have some drinks and chat to people some more
Closing drinks
Umbraco Spark is a fantastic conference. Gibe do a great job of organising everything leading up to the event and executing it on the day.
They always pick interesting topics and speakers so you can come away with new ideas and inspiration.
I'm looking forward to going back there again next year.
