Package Jam
The day before Spark, I had the opportunity to attend the pre Umbraco Spark Package Jam, which was a lot of fun!
There were both experienced and first-time package developers at the Package Jam - thankfully, Lotte Pitcher's Opinionated Package Starter was a great template to get started, it even includes a test site and deployment tooling to make things as easy as they can be if you're developing a package.
Tristan and I decided to team up and build a package to restore some functionality to Umbraco Models Builder, and we were both ecstatic that we managed to get this released and live on the Umbraco Marketplace in a matter of hours, with support for Umbraco versions 13 and 15!
There were also plenty of Umbraco MVPs around lending a hand to anyone who needed one, and I think everyone who attended took something valuable from it, whether that was a released package, a package concept or prototype to finish up in the future, or even just some learnings.
The Main Event
There was a nice mix of longer form presentations like Anna-Maria Wykes' "Unlocking Data Potential: Microsoft Fabric for Software Developers", exploring Microsoft Fabric with some great insight into how it can be utilised, as well as lightning style talks like Richard Jackson's "Process Mapping As Code with Mermaid", which I'll definitely be trying out whenever I need to create process/architecture diagrams in the future.
Some talks that were personal highlights for me throughout the day were:
- Kevlin Henney's talk on Technical Neglect, which was a thought-provoking reframing of the concept of technical debt.
- Markus Johansson's talk entitled "The road to Umbraco 15!", an informative history lesson from the perspective of a developer who has been working with Umbraco since 2006!
- I also have to shout out Gibe's very own Luke Hook for delivering his talk on Hybrid Cache while cosplaying as Ash Ketchum, which garnered a good few chuckles across the venue.
The bar was opened before the Package Jam Awards, (fortunately for those of us who were shortly due to give a demo of our packages!) and this was a fantastic way to end the event - there were 13 package demos to run through in 45 minutes, which I think is fair to say was more than expected, and the coveted Package Jam trophy was awarded to Georgina Bidder, who developed a great package to generate Lorem Ipsum sample text in the Umbraco backoffice, which I think resonated with everyone who has ever had to create test content, well deserved!
After the conference, everyone was invited to an after-party at Ritorno Lounge, which was only a short walk from the venue and a perfect opportunity to meet with a lot of friendly faces from the Umbraco community.
I've heard from a few attendees and organisers that this was the best Spark yet! If you attended, please share your feedback here to help make the next one even better.
If you're thinking about attending for the first time, I'd highly recommend it - and on behalf of everyone from Gibe, I'd like to thank everyone who attended, hopefully we'll have the opportunity to see you again next year!
