Setting the goal
Becoming an Umbraco Certified Professional was a goal I set early on. Not as a badge or status symbol, but as a way to confirm that I genuinely understood Umbraco beyond tutorials and small personal projects.
I wanted to know how Umbraco works in real environments, how it fits into ASP.NET, and how design decisions affect sites months or years down the line.
Learning Umbraco properly
Beyond document types and templates
Early learning focused on more than surface level features. Understanding content flow, rendering pipelines and how Umbraco structures data internally made a significant difference.
Rather than copying patterns, I focused on why things worked the way they did.
Understanding responsibility and structure
Learning Umbraco also meant learning restraint. Not every feature needs to be used, and not every problem needs a complex solution. Structure and clarity mattered more than cleverness.
Real-world experience
Joining a professional environment
After finishing my GCSEs, I joined Simon Antony Ltd, an Umbraco Silver Partner. Working on real client projects introduced constraints that tutorials never do.
Legacy decisions, deadlines and existing codebases forced me to understand systems quickly and work carefully.
Learning from existing systems
Older Umbraco sites taught me as much as new builds. Seeing how decisions aged over time shaped how I approached new work.
Certification and reflection
Preparing for the exam
The certification process focused on understanding rather than memorisation. Knowing how and why Umbraco behaves as it does mattered more than recalling features.
Achieving certification
Passing the exam first time, and doing so before turning 16, was a major milestone. More importantly, it validated my approach to learning systems deeply and deliberately.
This site exists partly to document that journey and partly to continue sharing what I learn as I grow professionally.