Day 1

"Wednesday afternoon, September 12, Menno and Pascal and I left Leiden on our way to Hamburg to attend the 10th edition of StripeCon (Silverstripe CMS conference). A nice train trip of about 6 hours. We had to change trains several times where 1 time we were almost late due to a visit to the local Vietnamese :-)."

"Along the way Menno drained the API of the StripeCon web app and put it into our festival app TMSQR. As a developer, you have to do something during such a long train ride ;-) Afterwards we immediately helped Andy Adiwidjaja, the organizer of this edition, to fix this security problem. Once we arrived in Hamburg, we arranged an Uber with a very talkative driver who took us to our beautiful accommodation."

Day 2

"The next morning we walked to the conference, close to our Airbnb. Once we arrived we were festively welcomed by Andy's wife. Here we immediately had a goodie bag pressed into our hands and were handed out our name tags. Well, mine unfortunately had already been given away to someone else so I had to make do with a handwritten one. Fortunately, breakfast was better. Delicious sweet treats with a large cup of coffee. We took our seats and waited for Andy Adiwidjaja to open."

"After this opening we were able to enjoy Stephen Makrogianni and Maxime Rainville on the latest Silverstripe version and the further future of Silverstripe. A lot of interesting and exciting things in the pipeline! After this talk we enjoyed a talk by James Cocker about creating SilverStripe modules. Incredibly useful now that we are obviously working on a modular, reusable setup for our product Youmie. Finally, a talk was given on the duality of AI. It can obviously be used for good, but also for evil purposes."

"After the AI talk, we were able to enjoy a tour and lunch through the port of Hamburg. Here we got to see one of the largest container ships in the world: ONE Infinity. After the cruise, the conference continued with lightning talks. Talks by members of the SilverStripe Community about things they have made or tools they use, very interesting and of course nice that there was room for this. After the lightning talks we were able to listen to Werner Krauß talk about Rektor. A tool to write better Php code. The last talk of the day was about Decision-making for developers. This talked more about the mental processes a developer has to deal with every day."

"After this last talk, we got to sit down for a delicious dinner. After dinner we participated in the evening program. We were divided into teams and could participate in a diverse selection of games. Pascal and Menno were on team Harry Potter. I got to help team Starwars lose, which worked out quite well. None of our teams ended up winning. The whole evening there was unlimited beer, very well organized :-). After the games we participated in karaoke late into the night."

Day 3

"The next morning the talks continued. We were told how you can contribute to make Silverstripe even better, it remains an open source project of course. This was followed by a very interesting talk about performance & caching. Something that we also encounter with some projects. Unfortunately we were unable to attend all the talks on day 2 as we had to get back to the station on time. After all, we still had a 6-hour journey ahead of us. All in all, we learned a lot and had an incredible time. Next year we definitely hope to go to StripeCon Europe 2024 in Ljubljana!"