Umbraco Together

Last month myself and a few other members of the true team headed over to London to embark on 2 days of Umbraco talks, how-to’s, a community hackathon, and of course – lots of pizza, at the Umbraco Together event. As a first timer at an Umbraco community in-person event, I really didn’t know what to expect here. I had visions of feeling like a fish out of water, but luckily this was not the case.

Umbraco Together from the get-go was a great introduction to the Umbraco Community, it really solidified the importance of open-source code and that collaboration is key. The perfect example being the fact that the first open-source project I worked on was during this year’s Hacktoberfest and the project I worked on was the Umbraco Community Quiz, created by Paul Seal, who I then got to meet at the Hackathon!

I started day one off at the Hackathon where I spent more of my time learning more about why Umbraco have chosen to use the Automated testing framework Playwright. Still pretty new to the test automation scene, Playwright enables reliable end-to-end testing for modern web apps. Many companies appear to be in the same boat, where they are trying to decide whether to move away from older testing frameworks such as Selenium or Cypress, to something new like Playwright but it can take them a while to adapt. But Umbraco’s big advantage in being open source is how quickly they can adapt and pivot, something which has allowed them to embrace Playwright as their new go-to testing framework, completely re-writing their testing suite to use Playwright, moving away from Cypress, ahead of the competition.

Although the day was split out into two parts - a morning of working alone on any Umbraco bugs or tickets, and then an afternoon of splitting into focus groups, I spent most of the day embracing new technology. I got involved in writing some tests for an Umbraco feature that they had not yet tested. I didn’t quite manage to finish but it was great to see how Umbraco has adapted and moved with the modern technology and I had the chance to contribute to it and write the tests in a language I had never used before – Typescript (I still plan on finishing those tests!).

On day 2 we all reconvened for tech talks from not only Umbraco themselves, but also keynote speakers and other member of the Umbraco community. Delving further into Playwright with a great demo of how simple the integration can be to improve your testing. As well as many other interesting talks by the Umbraco partners, I thoroughly enjoyed the community keynotes, which included a quick talk from Paul Seal, covering his Umbraco Community Quiz project. It has been great to personally be able to see the project through from development to going live. The two days really flowed together nicely, with day one’s Hackathon work being covered in the following days talks.

Umbraco Together was a great event not just for the Umbraco Community to get together again, work on some open-source code and collaborate, it was also an event where I got to see how the community utilises Umbraco and how its partners and Umbraco themselves adapt and embrace modern technology. But overall, the event really demonstrated what a strong community Umbraco have behind them.