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development time, reduce risk, keep technical debt in check and help teams adopt new technologies sooner while avoiding outdated approaches and reinventing the wheel.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

Links from slides

• Getting involved in the Umbraco Community
• The Open Source Way
• Ingram, C., & Drachen, A. (2020). How do Software Professionals Use Local Informal Meetups?
• Hemetsberger, A., & Reinhardt, C. (2006). Learning and Knowledge-building in Open-source Communities: A Social-experiential Approach. (Free)
• There are Umbraco Meetups all over the UK, and some virtual ones too.
• Codegarden convince your boss
• My Social Media

This is the full, non-Umbraco specific version of this talk. An abridged version of this recording was shown at WeAreDevelopers World Congress 2024.

Some of the content of this talk is also available in an article on 24 Days in Umbraco.

Composable Digital eXperience Platforms (DXPs) are all the rage and, simply put, they're all about integrations. There are many methodologies when it comes to building integrations and not all suit every purpose. We'll take a look at some of these methods and look at their pros and cons, assessing which solutions best suit which scenarios. We'll talk about integration concepts and how multiple separate systems can be combined into one composable DXP as well as looking at some more developer-focused examples integrating with Azure and other Microsoft products.

• Sample code repo
• Slides

Read a writeup of this talk on the GitKraken website.