The Dutch community is back

What happens when four agencies that usually compete for the same clients decide to throw a party together? Turns out you get about 100 Umbracians in Apeldoorn, a full afternoon of talks and a venue that practically had to kick us out at closing time.

On Tuesday 22 September the very first Dutch Umbraco Alliance Festival took place at STOOM in Apeldoorn, and I got to be there. Not only that, I got to be on stage (more on that in a bit). This is my look back at the day, with a lot of help from the people who wrote about it before I got around to it.

Who made this happen

First things first, because none of this happens by itself. The festival was organised by a cross-company crew of developers: Jeroen Visschers, Erik-Jan Westendorp, Timo Schraa, Johan Reitsma, Bernadet Goey, Miguel Martinez Musterd and Lennard Fonteijn, from TRES, iO, ilionx and Conclusion Experience. Those four agencies also sponsored the whole thing, and the tickets were free.

ilionx put it better than I could in a comment afterwards: "Four agencies that usually compete for the same clients, one evening sharing what works in AI, Aspire and headless." That's the Umbraco community in one sentence, if you ask me.

Jeroen Visschers wrote a lovely organiser's-eye view of the day, describing months of planning turning into "a full house of Umbraco enthusiasts" as "a bit surreal, but oh so satisfying". I can only imagine!

Two more things that made the day work really well:

• An actual MC. Thersa Witteveen kept the day together and moving along nicely.

• A great venue. STOOM rolled with every last-minute change the organisers threw at them, and Michael Latouche called it a "cool location" on his way home on the train.

Richard van der Meel thanked the team for "rebooting" the Dutch Umbraco Festival, and I think that's exactly the right word. It's been a while since the Dutch community had something like this, and it was lovely to see how many people showed up for it.

The keynote (surprise, I'm in it)

The schedule said Lotte Pitcher and Emma Potter would do the community keynote. Travel logistics had other plans for Emma, so I got to step in and join Lotte on stage instead.

We talked about where Umbraco goes from here. Jeroen Breuer's write-up summarises it really well: we're expanding AI in two directions. Features inside the CMS, like Umbraco Automate, and making Umbraco accessible to AI agents through MCP servers and agent skills.

A big part of the keynote was about how much the community still shapes everything we do. Whether that's reporting issues, sending pull requests, or coming to us with feature requests and proposals, a lot of what ends up in Umbraco started with one of you. One of those proposals came from Lennard Fonteijn, and it's almost a reality.. after 7 years of very patient waiting 🙈 Sometimes we just have to prioritise, but I hope we've also shown that most things happen a lot quicker than that!

Luckily there was plenty of good news to balance that out. We walked through what's coming in Umbraco 19 and the roadmap beyond it, and the feature that seemed to stick with people the most was Reusable Content of Blocks. It's a great example of the community shaping the product: it was built directly on your feedback. Jeroen Breuer said as much in his write-up, noting that it stood out even more than all the AI news. I'll take that as a compliment for everyone who asked for it!

We also gave a peek at the Umbraco AI Copilot Workspace. Dion van Velde picked up on the thread running through the whole keynote, and summed it up nicely: technology only becomes really valuable once an engaged community and critical developers put their stamp on it. That's exactly the point we were trying to make, so I'm glad it landed.

TikTok award

There was time for a little fun. Luuk Peters unwittingly participated in a little competition on our MVP Slack channel and won the "best TikTokker award". Yes, that's now a thing. Yep. Totally.

Luuk goes from sceptic to (careful) believer

Speaking of Luuk: he was our next speaker in line with "Took Some Convincing: How AI Changed the Way I Work as a Developer". I love a talk with an honest title.

Luuk went from "I don't trust AI" to barely writing code himself. The important part, as Jeroen Breuer summarised it, is that it's not about replacing developers, it's about shifting what developers actually do. Luuk uses Claude plus MCP servers to understand complex codebases faster, and then builds better features on top of that understanding. AI handles the mechanics, the decisions stay human.

This talk hits close to home as I have been on a similar journey myself. This also matches a lot of conversations I've been having lately, and it was great to hear it from someone who clearly started out very sceptical as well. The sceptics make the most convincing converts.

Your local DevEx sucks

Thimo Koolen talked about .NET Aspire, and his opening slide simply said "Your local DevEx sucks". Well, why don't you tell us how you really feel 😆

He proceeded to prove it: eight terminals, port conflicts, hardcoded connection strings, and debugging across services turning into something close to impossible. Aspire solves that by defining your service orchestration in code, and you get unified dashboards, service discovery and observability built in.

Dion van Velde wrote a great Dutch blog post about the day and summarised this one as finally getting rid of the "onboarding takes three weeks" pain. If you've ever onboarded someone onto a big solution, you know exactly what he means.

Headless, not clueless

Last but not least, Richard Soeteman closed the day with "Headless not Clueless". Ipsis called Richard "always entertaining", which is true, and Gerben van Diggelen summed it up perfectly in Dutch: "Klassiek was het. Inclusief live demo." (It was a classic. Including a live demo.)

A live demo at the end of a long afternoon, now that's confidence.

Get well soon, Dave

There was supposed to be one more talk. Dave Woestenborghs was going to share what he learned battle-testing the new Umbraco Search while it was still in alpha. Unfortunately Dave was sick on the day, which is a real shame because I know a lot of people were looking forward to it. Get well soon Dave, and I really hope we get to see that talk somewhere soon!

The hallway track

The schedule had a 90 minute block at the end simply called "Socialize", and that turned out to be exactly as important as the talks. People caught up with old friends, met new ones and argued about AI, headless and Aspire over a drink.

Dave Jonker wrote that he hopes it will become a recurring event. Richard van der Meel wants to bring back meetups "from time to time as well". I'm with both of them, and I'd love to see this turn into a regular thing again.

Festival season

This was one of several Umbraco festivals this autumn. The first ever Umbraco India Festival happened in Kochi at the end of August, the Umbraco UK Festival is coming up in London on 16 October and Umbracokalaset brings talks (and fika!) to Stockholm a few days after that. You can find all the upcoming festivals and events on the Umbraco events page.

See you soon!

A huge #H5YR to the organisers, the sponsors, the speakers, STOOM and everyone who showed up. You made the first Dutch Umbraco Alliance Festival a great day, and you proved that the Dutch Umbraco community is alive and kicking.

As Jeroen Visschers put it: "This community is genuinely the friendliest of all." I'm clearly biased, but I'm not going to argue with that.

See you at the next one!