I'm really please to be kicking off a new session of Community Corner. If you haven't heard of Community Corner before, it's a blog series that I have ran in the past where I introduce individuals who are maybe new to the Umbraco Community or I feel they deserve a bit more of a highlight. 

It's a real mix of people, some developers, some project managers, basically anyone who has an interest in Umbraco and being part of the Community.

With that in mind, I would like to introduce the first new member to the Community Corner.

Sam Mullins

Who am I and what do I do for a living?

My name is Sam Mullins and I am a web developer at Redweb

Where can you find me on the internet?

Website: https://sammullins.co.uk
Twitter: _SamMullins_

Question time! 

If you could interview anyone in the world, who would it be and why?

Who wouldn't want to spend a bit of time with Stephen Fry?

What hobbies do you have? 

I'm currently a scratch handicap golfer and also really enjoy photography.

What's your favourite book?

• A storm of swords - George R.R. Martin
• The final empire - Brandon Sanderson
• The name of the wind - Patrick Rothfuss
  
  Probably one of those.

What's your favourite movie?

The Godfather

If you are in to music, what are you currently listening to?

The last thing I listened to before writing this is Herbie Hancock's Thrust album.

If you are currently learning something, what is it?

I have a 1200 day streak learning Italian on Duolingo, but if I actually met an Italian I'd be amazed if I even managed one coherent sentence. I've also been looking into a bit of machine learning as I need it for one of my CaptureOne plugins I'm making.

Umbraco related questions

What first interested you in using Umbraco CMS?

It was so long ago that I can't remember, but I think Redweb was looking for an open source .Net CMS.

How long have you been using Umbraco CMS?

I must be very close to my exact 10 year anniversary. The first time I'd have used Umbraco would've been late 2010 or early 2011.

If you could change one thing in Umbraco, what would it be?

I wish there was a free / cheaper cloud tier for developers to put up a simple blog site. 30 quid a month is unaffordable and that's the reason I built xStatic.

Do you use any other CMS? How does it compare to Umbraco CMS?

Day to day I use Sitecore. It's incredibly powerful and I think I do take for granted just how extensible it is, but the basic developer workflow doesn't feel as efficient as with Umbraco. Not only is the licence expensive, but hosting it also costs a fortune. From my experience, plenty of companies don't use the advanced features of their complex digital experience platforms, and maybe simplifying to a product like Umbraco would allow them to spend budget improving the user's experience.

What packages do you use regularly?

I used ui-o-matic when I built xStatic and I really enjoyed using it! I'm a little worried that the recently updated licence prevents people from using it on Cloud.

Do you build packages? If so, which ones?

xStatic - a static site generator that allows you to host your Umbraco site on Netlify or GitHub pages. UmbracoFolio - every component I built for my personal site is open source for others to use.

Published on: 11 March 2021