Flatcamp 2024 in Rome
Drove to Rome with my good friend Jacob for Flatcamp, the Statamic community gathering at a private Italian villa. I presented liveblogs with WebSockets and Livewire. Met most of the Statamic community for the first time.
I brought my good friend Jacob along and we drove down to Rome. A few stops along the way through Italy, good food, no rush. Flatcamp was held at a private villa outside Rome. Three days with the Statamic core team and developers from all over. No auditorium, no slides-in-a-dark-room. Workshops outdoors, conversations over meals cooked by a private chef, and the kind of hallway track you can't get at a regular conference.
Liveblogs at scale
I presented how we built liveblogs in Statamic at TV2 Regionerne. The setup: WebSockets and Livewire, with full DOM diffs compiled server-side and pushed to clients. On election nights and breaking news, thousands of readers sit on a liveblog page refreshing constantly. The trick was doing the rendering once on the server and broadcasting the compiled HTML via WebSockets, so the servers barely noticed the load even during peak traffic.
It worked in production at scale. 90,000 requests per second on election night, and the liveblog infrastructure handled it without breaking a sweat. The key insight: don't make every client request a fresh render. Compile once, push everywhere.
Meeting the community
This was the first time I met most of the Statamic community in person. Jack McDade and the core team were there. Developers and agency owners from across Europe. People whose addons I'd used, whose code I'd read, whose forum posts had helped me solve problems.
Three days in a villa together changes things compared to a quick chat at a conference booth.
The format works because there's nowhere to hide. No parallel tracks, no slipping out early. You're at a villa in Italy with thirty people for three days. Every meal is a conversation, every evening turns into show-and-tell. I got more out of those three days than most conferences I've attended.
The swag
I brought custom beer. Labeled as "Statamic Brewing Company" with two varieties: Liquid YAML (Imperial Raspberry Sour) and Pineapple Sunset. T-shirts, tumblers, and printed labels. If you're going to show up at a community gathering, show up properly.
The drive
The road trip with Jacob was half the experience. Denmark to Rome through Germany, Austria, and down through Italy. We stopped along the way, ate well, and arrived relaxed instead of jet-lagged. Coming home the same way, processing everything we'd seen and talked about over the past three days. Sometimes the best part of a conference is the trip there and back.