Umbraco Together is a conference showcasing the best talks the community has to offer, including Umbraco 9, technical deep-dives, how-to's, case studies, inspiring stories and more.

The day started off with some breakfast and coffee, before heading into the opening talks. There was a colour coded lanyard system in place, to help make people more comfortable about being approached, which I thought was a nice touch.

Callum Whyte from Bump Digital welcomed everyone to the conference, and announced the launch of the Umbraco Foundation. Umbraco Foundation was set up as a way of supporting the unique UK community. It's a non-profit organisation that consists of a technical and community board who work at improving diversity and inclusion within the community, and help to provide funding for meetups, speakers, spaces to host meetups, and tickets and travel expenses.

We then started the day with a keynote from Filip Bruun Bech-Larsen (Umbraco CTO). The main focus throughout the day was Umbraco 9, which launched recently. It is a great time to be working with Umbraco, particularly in the UK as we have such a large community here.

Some stats:

• 65,000+ installs of Umbraco 9
• 500+ Umbraco 9 Cloud projects
• 155 Umbraco Gold Partners (21 new this year) - we are gold partners
• 1300+ people completed certifications in 2021
• Every 6 months a new major version of Umbraco will be shipped

Throughout the day there were various talks, both virtually and in person, and we learned a lot about the Umbraco 9 changes. The key change that is important is that Umbraco now runs on ASP.NET Core. But what does this mean?

• Umbraco 9 is significantly faster
• Modern – stay up to date with the newest tech stack
• Cross platform - you can now develop Umbraco from Windows, Mac or Linux

Attending conferences such as Umbraco Together is important to Dog. As a leading Umbraco agency, we make sure we’re always up to date with the latest technology and new Umbraco features. We use Umbraco with many of our clients, and being able to implement the latest features allows for a better user experience overall. We also like to keep on top of any changes and how we may need to adapt in the future!

We have already started using what we’ve learned in this conference by rebuilding the entire Dog site in Umbraco 9 from scratch! We’ve learned the differences between Umbraco 8 and 9 and can clearly see the improvements. The speed improvement when working in the back office is particularly noticeable. It also allowed us to experiment with the different cross-platform ways of deploying the website, and all of this will help for future client work. We’re excited to demo and show clients the latest Umbraco features and improvements!