Codegarden #4 for me, CG19 was possibly my favourite yet! With a chance to learn, meetup with friends and even share some knowledge with the community, here are some of my highlights:
Carole Logan
About the author
Carole is a team leader, developer & community meetup organiser. With an interest in web & IOT technologies, Carole has a passion for how we can use technology to solve real-life problems. As well as software development, she has a keen interest in the “people” side of tech, how can we make the industry a better place to work for everyone and ultimately build better products.
Codegarden retreat
The weekend before Codegarden 23 people, a mix of Umbraco HQ and invited people from community work together for 3 days discussing the future of Umbraco. I was lucky enough to be one of these people again this year! We spent day 1 in Odense at Umbraco HQ, learning about this year’s themes and splitting in to teams. I was working on the roadmap for Umbraco’s move to .Net Core with Stephan, Shannon, Bjarke and Lars.
On day 2 we continued to work in our teams, this time from the lovely location of Svendborg. From social media it would look like we were just eating amazing food in a lovely location… which we were, but also with alot of hard work too ;) Aswell as working on the roadmap and architecture for .Net core (or Project UniCore🦄as our code name) we also helped define the RFC (Request for Contributions) process for community feedback to the project. It was really awesome to see the work we done mentioned in the keynote and also discussed in more detail in the Friday sessions at Codegarden.
Keynote
The first session of Codegarden is always a good one… the keynote.This is where Niels Hartvig (The Chief unicorn and founder of Umbraco) discusses the latest Umbraco news, products and announces the MVPs.The keynote also included information on the roadmap from CTO Jacob and demos of new content apps including Nathan Wolfe’s Pre-Flight.The keynote also announced the new RFC process and a few RFCs the retreat teams worked on. These can be reviewed here.
As part of the keynote, we found out there will now be a public roadmap for the project. This was good news as we can now plan for upcoming changes to Umbraco and let clients/ teammates know of planned releases. The roadmap was split to “now”, “next” and “later” rather than specific dates, as an indication of the current priorities for development. Interesting points from this:
Roadmap
v7.15 will be the last planned release in v7, with all focus going to the newly released v8.
v8.1 coming soon, with breaking changes
Headless launch in Q3 (in v8 Umbraco)
Umbraco v7 to v8 migration tool coming soon
Grid Editor 2.0 is being worked on (and good progress was made at the retreat)
.Net core is “later” but on the roadmap as the future of Umbraco
The talks
As always, the quality of talks at Codegarden was really high, there were often too many great ones to choose from in one schedule slot so I will need to catch up on videos when they go live.
I really enjoyed Maria Naggaga’s talk on interactive documentation, particularly as it’s so new technology it was great to see how it was built. She showed us Try .NET, an inline code runner and playground that enables people to experiment and learn about C# in the browser. Check it out here.
The first talk of Day 2 was Tim Kadlec, he discussed performance and things we can do as developers to think of different kinds of users and the performance impact sites we build has on them.
One of my favourite talks was Jeffrey Schoemaker discussing his vision and dreams of where the Umbraco CMS project will go. He split these by theme and gave some really great ideas on where he would focus on improving Umbraco. It will be great to see which make it in to core, and if some will become community packages.
Emma Burstow’s talk on “Developing Talent” was really great, she discussed how we can all work on our learning and with a growth mindset can improve our ways of learning. In an industry that is always changing and giving us new frameworks and technologies to pick up, the ability to learn is arguable the developers greatest skill!
I was lucky enough to be accepted to give a talk on Empathy and why it’s so important in developing products, building teams and in tech communities. This is something I really care about and I was happy to be able to share my thoughts and research on this topic. To everyone who came along to my talk or spoke to be about it after, thank you, I really appreciate it!
The “non-coding” things
From the 7am morning run to yoga sessions and mindfulness ahead of the keynote, Codegarden isn’t your typical programmers conference. It’s great to see a focus on wellbeing and looking after our body’s aswell as our minds. A healthy developer is a happy developer :)
Also, any conference with tea and blankets and themed nail art is appreciated is a winner for me.
One of my personal highlights is seeing how many women were attending and on the speakers list this year. Finding a community where you can truly be yourself is a special thing, particularly in tech where alot of communities still expect you to fit a stereotype to be taken seriously. In Umbraco, diversity of community has clearly been a focus and they are a great example of what can be done in just a few short years. Look at this years ladies of Codegarden, we will need a bigger stage next year.
As our first year as Umbraco gold partners, it was our first year attending the gold partner summit. It was great to have a chance to chat to other gold partners and the Umbraco HQ team in the Q&A sessions and I even got to take part in the community one to discuss my experience as a meetup organiser and how we can continue to get community involved in Umbraco.
Another great year for Codegarden, an event that seems to get bigger and better each year while retaining it’s charm and friendliness. As always, everyone leaves Codegarden full of motivation and energy so I look forward to seeing what exciting things people make in the next year... See you at at CG20!
If you missed out on Codegarden, don’t worry, we will be hosting the Glasgow meetup with a recap of latest news for Umbraco. Sign up here!