What happens when your team spends work time eating pizza and hanging out with other techies? Surprisingly, they don’t just come back with stickers. They come back with ideas, solutions to problems, and a renewed enthusiasm for the work in front of them.
The Umbraco community is one of the most active in the tech world, with in-person and virtual meetups across the globe hosting experts who love sharing their knowledge. For businesses, these events are an incredibly cost‑effective way to keep teams engaged and learning. While conferences or formal training can swallow days of time and thousands in cash, a local meetup costs little more than a couple of hours and a bus fare — yet often delivers insights that save development time, reduce risk, keep technical debt in check and help teams adopt new technologies sooner while avoiding outdated approaches and reinventing the wheel.
In this lightning talk, Joe shares what he’s learned as an organiser of the Bristol Umbraco Meetup — one of the longest‑running and best‑attended groups in the community.
If you want a stronger tech team and bulletproof projects, helping them engage with the community might just be the highest-value superpower you can give them.
Arguably one of the talks that sat with me for the rest of the day and the inspiration behind this reflective blogpost was by Joe Glombek. This was one of the smaller 10min talks but its impact was big. His talk about community and the benefits of attending or engaging with it holds true how I felt before and after the event. Those attending conferences, meetups, hackathons - whether online or in person - really does break up the day-to-day grind. It can give a sense of purpose, it can educate. It really provides space for you to not only grow your professional skills but your personal ones too.
Finding my Spark through Community by Mitchell Nortje, Senior Software Developer at Spinbox