Well, it's been a while since I blogged! What better excuse to start back than a conference trip!
At the start of April I travelled to Frankfurt, Germany to attend Umbraco Festival Desutchland for the second time (I attended last year and wrote about it here).
This year I decided to arrive a bit early and give time to explore the city a wee bit. So on Thursday morning I took a walk around Frankfurt before heading to Byte5 for the hackathon. The hackathon was run by Soren from Byte5 and Poorinima from the community PR team, it was a mix of people working on a package and some working on Umbraco pull requests.
Ahead of the pre-party, a group of us attendees/ speakers who had travelled to Frankfurt went for dinner, I always find these parts of conferences really interesting. When else would you get a chance to talk to all these experts on .Net/ AI/ testing from different countries over dinner?! Then it was on to Byte5 office for the preparty where there were unicorn themed everything and a bar serving Umbraco themed cocktails.
Early the next day, it was time for #UFDRunners (Myself and Soren), to go for a nice 6km run along the river. I try to run in any city I go to ahead of a conference where I know I will be sitting down in a venue most of the day. It really helps with my nerves when speaking at the conference too. Thanks Soren for the run tour of Frankfurt and for slowing your usual pace for me!!
A quick taxi from east end to west end of the city and it was time for the conference! First up was a welcome Christian from Byte5 (who organise the conference) and Pete Duncanson giving us tips on being good audience. Then on to the keynote with Kim and Jacob from Umbraco HQ who let us know about the recent growth of HQ team and information on what the different teams work on.
Next up was my talk! This was the most nervous I have been for a talk in a while, I think because it wasn't about coding or a project I have worked on but about more emotional and human aspects of development. The talk was 'Empathy in Tech' discussing how having empathy is an important and valuable skill to have in life (and as a technologist).
I also attended talks by Poorinima, Ismail and Kenneth, which were all great! Poorinima gave a talk on her journey in Umbraco community and how others can get involved. Ismail gave a talk: "teaching an old dog new tricks", letting us know about clean coding principles with some funny examples and memes (Still Game references still in there from his talk at DDD Scotland made me smile!). Kenneth from Umbraco HQ gave a talk about V8 showing how he built a mobile app that calls custom APIs built in Umbraco v8. It was great to see some live examples of v8.
As with all Umbraco festivals, the line up was so good, I had to miss some other talks so I am really looking forward to the videos being available!
As with any Umbraco event I attend I always end up writing about community, but it's hard not to. It is quite awesome to travel to another country and know you have friends there at the event. It's often the conversations over lunch or at pre/ after party that you learn the most from. I would really recommend people attending these community events if they can and submitting talks to speak!
Back home to Glasgow for a few days then next it's Umbraco Roadshow Barcelona!