West Midlands Umbraco Meetup (Brum Braco)

Last night I attended the first West Midlands Umbraco Meetup. It was held at the Appcentric office in Birmingham.

After being crammed in like sardines on the train I had a lovely walk through Birmingham, past the Christmas market, over to Alpha Works where the Appcentric offices were.

On arrival, there was food laid out and cocktail bar.

There were 3 of us from the East Midlands Umbraco Meetup who were there to support this new meetup. Andy Carlier (our meetup organiser) and Ian Robinson.

It was great to see so many people from Umbraco HQ, but I suppose that is a good side effect of having a meetup right after the cloud roadshow.

There was a good turnout of about 25 people there.

The first talk was from Mike Pederson who was talking about the Umbraco Community and how much the UK does in terms of market share, meetups and MVPs etc.

The second talk was about how they used Umbraco with Vue. They showed some good use cases and showed some snippets to explain how simple it can be.

It gave me food for thought and made me want to try it out myself.

The next talk was about how AI is used for Marketing. This was interesting but wasn't really about Umbraco.

After that we had a nice talk about how they used the Umbraco Authorised Services package to simplify integrations which use oAuth.

This was interesting to me because I had tried using this package before and had issues with the refreshing of the tokens. We were given tips on how to avoid such issues and how we can check to see if any of the services had become unauthorised following a deployment.

And finally, Dan Lister from Umbraco HQ did a talk about the infrastructure of the services part of Umbraco Cloud.

This was interesting to me as I've been learning a lot about Terraform lately.

After the talks we all went to the pub (Albert's Scholss), which was a massive pub with live entertainment and it was really busy for a Tuesday night.

I got chance to talk to people from HQ about Umbraco Cloud and pre-sales. As well as talk to Lotte about her developer relations role.

All in all it was a very good evening.