Do you want to travel into a cosy, little town in Sweden, talk about all things Umbraco and enjoy your evening with a dinner inside a medieval castle? That is exactly what I did during my attendance at this year's Umbraco Sweden Festival. The festival was organised by Impera and Webmind and it was the third year Umbraco Festival in Sweden.
The festival took place in a little town called Örebro on September 19th. One of the organizers, Impera, have their main offices here. Its about a 2hr train ride from Stockholm. Don't be put off by the length of the journey because a train ride by the Swedish countryside is totally worth it. Wikipedia tells me it is the 7th largest city in Sweden and what a beautiful place it was! Cobbled streets, a river, a medieval castle, lots of greenery with the fall setting in. I am quite convinced that the crispy air I experienced at Örebro is THE definition of fresh air.
The festival kicked off with a pre-party on the evening of September 18th. I reached Örebro around 1700 on the day. I checked into my hotel, made a quick phone call back home and went straight into the pre-party organised at a restaurant called Makariet, 2 mins away from the hotel. I didn't know many people from the Umbraco community in Sweden but that was the whole point of my trip, meet and greet new people. Of course, there was a good attendance from the HQ and Callum from the UK. The evening was very chilled out. Lots of friendly chit chat, amazing food and great ambience! It was a great way to break the ice, meet new faces and relax. Undoubtedly, one of the best pre-parties I have attended. I retired to my hotel room before midnight to put an end to my long day and check that my slides for the next day are in order.
The event took place at the Elite Hotel at Örebro and trust me when I say that the conference hall was one of the most beautiful event venues I have ever been to. A big conference room, with high ceilings and some beautiful chandeliers. I must say it felt great to present in such a conference venue.
The festival kicked off with a keynote delivered by Nuria Gonzalez-Candia from Google. She spoke about how mobile-first is still very relevant. The keynote sat very well in the context of some other talks during the day - Emelie's talk on how to optimize your site post-launch and Erik's talk on improving the performance of your site. Some of the stats that came across were mind-blowing.
All of this speaks a lot, we have real work to do around mobile, attracting and retaining users over mobile. Progressive Web Apps seems to be the future of the web.
Nuria also mentioned the need for a mobile budget and strategy which was a whole new topic for me. Overall, I found the keynote very insightful and something I thoroughly enjoyed.
After the "Fika" break talks separated into two streams - business and tech. All the talks I attended were tech talks. The first one was Callum's talk "Wrong way or Another" which dealt with the many ways of doing things in Umbraco. In Umbraco, there are many ways to achieve the same thing. This talk was based on Callum's extensive experience in tech leading Umbraco builds and setting things right with inherited projects. He spoke on how you can arrive at a good, future-proof way of doing things and some of the best practices or standards that he has been sticking to when it comes to his projects. He covered topics like having a home page picker to take over the home page of your website to the way he uses ModelsBuilder in his projects. After using Umbraco for about 8 years I have also started doing things in a standard way in my projects and it was reassuring to see that what I am doing is in line with how the community does it. Sometimes there is no right way, only the better way and this talk was all about that.
The next talk was Alice Puricica's talk on how she worked on an e-commerce website, which can act as a B2A, B2B, B2C and B2D platforms. This was one of the talks I was looking forward to as the case sounded very interesting. "An inspiring story of how a client who went from only having a simple PHP site to having a commerce swiss army knife that can also handle 36 million price variations and has an extremely flexible discount awarding system." I am currently working on a website in Umbraco v7 with Merchello provisioning the e-commerce aspect of the website so I approached the talk with the view of ideas and what you can do. It was very clear from the talk on how Alice and her colleagues have pushed uCommerce to its limits to deliver a performant, do-it-all e-commerce platform.
The first talk after lunch was mine and I spoke on the topic "Open Source Takeaways from Umbraco". This was my second attempt at a talk, the first one being in Germany earlier this year at the Umbraco Festival Deutschland. The subject is something I am passionate about. I am a part of the Pull Request Team which is a good enough case for me to choose the topic. Further, I started contributing to Umbraco in 2017 and over the last year I have managed to become one of the top 10 contributors to Umbraco. This was a target I had set to myself - to make sure my face is visible in the GitHub Contributions sections on the homepage of Our, before you click the "Load more" button. Sounds silly, I know but sometimes you need to have a go at the silliest, craziest ideas to keep fuelling you ahead. I have managed to do it and its something I am quietly very proud of. I have learnt many things during my journey and the message I wanted to convey was "If I can do it, so can you". If you attended my talk, feel free to let me know what your thoughts are and reach out to me if you need any help too :-) I am happy to help in whatever possible ways I can. Jens, thank you for reaching out to me and having me as one of the speakers at the festival :-)
The next talk I attended was the session on performance improvements by Erik Lissel. It was amazing to see how some of the simple things can matter much when it comes to performance and increasing your score for Google. He spoke about why the speed of your website matters, how you can measure it. Some of the tips included how you can effectively bundle your CSS and Javascript, lazy load images, async loading of scripts. He also spoke about the usage of ImageProcessor. The imagery on any website is something I personally find quite hard to strike a balance. Its one of those things where you really need to collaborate with your front-end developer and arrive at the best possible way of doing it. A very effective talk and something I enjoyed. I will be trying out the tips I learnt on imagery for sure!
The last talk of the day, before the keynote, was from Claus and Bjarke at the HQ. They spoke about what is happening with v8, many things that have changed between v7 and v8, the reasons why it was done. The topics ranged from infinite editing, variants, custom sections, the new log viewer to some of the work that is in progress. Looking forward to seeing some of it in action soon in v8 :-)
Finally, it was time for the closing keynote from the Chief Unicorn himself. I am not going to say much about it as it was as inspiring as it always has been. He spoke a lot about community, his recent decision to focus on the product and community to the amazing numbers of PR's around Core and Documentation.
The festival was followed by a Gala Dinner at the Örebro Slott, a medieval castle. It was a wonderful experience! I can't say anything more than this as the food was amazing and it was my first experience dining inside a castle. Another interesting fact was that Emelie Borg, one of the speakers at the festival and Web Analyst happened to work here as an intern and she shared some of the facts about the castle with us. What a venue it was!
uSweFest19 was my second attempt at attending a country festival other than the UK. The first one was UFD19. And I enjoyed being there. You don't need me to tell you about the fantastic community in Umbraco and its the people aspect of the community that brings me back to the various meet-ups and festivals I attend. uSweFest was no different. Amazing people, great talks and above all a day to learn to enjoy and have fun. Thank you Impera and Webmind for the wonderful hospitality! I had a great time at the festival. #H5YR to Rasmus Söderström and Jens Josefsson for taking care of every possible aspect of the festival. It was a very well organised event. Every aspect about the event, from the venue, food, to the back up laptops, cables, you had it all thoroughly covered. You've certainly set the bar quite high and I hope uSweFest20 turns out to be a rocking event.
A few clicks from the day before I sign off...
The festival took place in a little town called Örebro on September 19th. One of the organizers, Impera, have their main offices here. Its about a 2hr train ride from Stockholm. Don't be put off by the length of the journey because a train ride by the Swedish countryside is totally worth it. Wikipedia tells me it is the 7th largest city in Sweden and what a beautiful place it was! Cobbled streets, a river, a medieval castle, lots of greenery with the fall setting in. I am quite convinced that the crispy air I experienced at Örebro is THE definition of fresh air.
 |
| Beautiful Örebro |
The festival kicked off with a pre-party on the evening of September 18th. I reached Örebro around 1700 on the day. I checked into my hotel, made a quick phone call back home and went straight into the pre-party organised at a restaurant called Makariet, 2 mins away from the hotel. I didn't know many people from the Umbraco community in Sweden but that was the whole point of my trip, meet and greet new people. Of course, there was a good attendance from the HQ and Callum from the UK. The evening was very chilled out. Lots of friendly chit chat, amazing food and great ambience! It was a great way to break the ice, meet new faces and relax. Undoubtedly, one of the best pre-parties I have attended. I retired to my hotel room before midnight to put an end to my long day and check that my slides for the next day are in order.
The event took place at the Elite Hotel at Örebro and trust me when I say that the conference hall was one of the most beautiful event venues I have ever been to. A big conference room, with high ceilings and some beautiful chandeliers. I must say it felt great to present in such a conference venue.
 |
| Views of the magnificent conference room |
The festival kicked off with a keynote delivered by Nuria Gonzalez-Candia from Google. She spoke about how mobile-first is still very relevant. The keynote sat very well in the context of some other talks during the day - Emelie's talk on how to optimize your site post-launch and Erik's talk on improving the performance of your site. Some of the stats that came across were mind-blowing.
- According to the data Google has, only 8% of businesses do the mobile-first approach properly.
- By 2021, 42% of e-commerce purchases across Europe will be over mobile, while this will be 75% across APAC.
- In 2000 attention span while using mobile or online was 12s whereas now, 3s is the recommended load time.
- 53% of of users abandon a website that takes more than 3s to load.
All of this speaks a lot, we have real work to do around mobile, attracting and retaining users over mobile. Progressive Web Apps seems to be the future of the web.
Nuria also mentioned the need for a mobile budget and strategy which was a whole new topic for me. Overall, I found the keynote very insightful and something I thoroughly enjoyed.
After the "Fika" break talks separated into two streams - business and tech. All the talks I attended were tech talks. The first one was Callum's talk "Wrong way or Another" which dealt with the many ways of doing things in Umbraco. In Umbraco, there are many ways to achieve the same thing. This talk was based on Callum's extensive experience in tech leading Umbraco builds and setting things right with inherited projects. He spoke on how you can arrive at a good, future-proof way of doing things and some of the best practices or standards that he has been sticking to when it comes to his projects. He covered topics like having a home page picker to take over the home page of your website to the way he uses ModelsBuilder in his projects. After using Umbraco for about 8 years I have also started doing things in a standard way in my projects and it was reassuring to see that what I am doing is in line with how the community does it. Sometimes there is no right way, only the better way and this talk was all about that.
The next talk was Alice Puricica's talk on how she worked on an e-commerce website, which can act as a B2A, B2B, B2C and B2D platforms. This was one of the talks I was looking forward to as the case sounded very interesting. "An inspiring story of how a client who went from only having a simple PHP site to having a commerce swiss army knife that can also handle 36 million price variations and has an extremely flexible discount awarding system." I am currently working on a website in Umbraco v7 with Merchello provisioning the e-commerce aspect of the website so I approached the talk with the view of ideas and what you can do. It was very clear from the talk on how Alice and her colleagues have pushed uCommerce to its limits to deliver a performant, do-it-all e-commerce platform.
The first talk after lunch was mine and I spoke on the topic "Open Source Takeaways from Umbraco". This was my second attempt at a talk, the first one being in Germany earlier this year at the Umbraco Festival Deutschland. The subject is something I am passionate about. I am a part of the Pull Request Team which is a good enough case for me to choose the topic. Further, I started contributing to Umbraco in 2017 and over the last year I have managed to become one of the top 10 contributors to Umbraco. This was a target I had set to myself - to make sure my face is visible in the GitHub Contributions sections on the homepage of Our, before you click the "Load more" button. Sounds silly, I know but sometimes you need to have a go at the silliest, craziest ideas to keep fuelling you ahead. I have managed to do it and its something I am quietly very proud of. I have learnt many things during my journey and the message I wanted to convey was "If I can do it, so can you". If you attended my talk, feel free to let me know what your thoughts are and reach out to me if you need any help too :-) I am happy to help in whatever possible ways I can. Jens, thank you for reaching out to me and having me as one of the speakers at the festival :-)
The next talk I attended was the session on performance improvements by Erik Lissel. It was amazing to see how some of the simple things can matter much when it comes to performance and increasing your score for Google. He spoke about why the speed of your website matters, how you can measure it. Some of the tips included how you can effectively bundle your CSS and Javascript, lazy load images, async loading of scripts. He also spoke about the usage of ImageProcessor. The imagery on any website is something I personally find quite hard to strike a balance. Its one of those things where you really need to collaborate with your front-end developer and arrive at the best possible way of doing it. A very effective talk and something I enjoyed. I will be trying out the tips I learnt on imagery for sure!
The last talk of the day, before the keynote, was from Claus and Bjarke at the HQ. They spoke about what is happening with v8, many things that have changed between v7 and v8, the reasons why it was done. The topics ranged from infinite editing, variants, custom sections, the new log viewer to some of the work that is in progress. Looking forward to seeing some of it in action soon in v8 :-)
Finally, it was time for the closing keynote from the Chief Unicorn himself. I am not going to say much about it as it was as inspiring as it always has been. He spoke a lot about community, his recent decision to focus on the product and community to the amazing numbers of PR's around Core and Documentation.
The festival was followed by a Gala Dinner at the Örebro Slott, a medieval castle. It was a wonderful experience! I can't say anything more than this as the food was amazing and it was my first experience dining inside a castle. Another interesting fact was that Emelie Borg, one of the speakers at the festival and Web Analyst happened to work here as an intern and she shared some of the facts about the castle with us. What a venue it was!
uSweFest19 was my second attempt at attending a country festival other than the UK. The first one was UFD19. And I enjoyed being there. You don't need me to tell you about the fantastic community in Umbraco and its the people aspect of the community that brings me back to the various meet-ups and festivals I attend. uSweFest was no different. Amazing people, great talks and above all a day to learn to enjoy and have fun. Thank you Impera and Webmind for the wonderful hospitality! I had a great time at the festival. #H5YR to Rasmus Söderström and Jens Josefsson for taking care of every possible aspect of the festival. It was a very well organised event. Every aspect about the event, from the venue, food, to the back up laptops, cables, you had it all thoroughly covered. You've certainly set the bar quite high and I hope uSweFest20 turns out to be a rocking event.
A few clicks from the day before I sign off...
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| "Fika" Break - Amazing cakes |
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| A selfie which went quite wrong! |
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| With Jens and Emily from Webmind |
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| With Ilham and Helle from the HQ |
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