Your IT Team's take on Codegarden '24

Your IT Team had the pleasure to send part of the team to the Codegarden '24 conference, in Odense, Denmark. They loved the experience, and decided to share their thoughts with us:

Codegarden 2024! What an event!

What did you think you were going to find there? What were your expectations?

• Joseph: Initially, I didn't have many expectations as this was my first time attending Umbraco Codegarden in person. However, I have attended Codegarden online in previous years, I hoped to gain deeper knowledge and practical tips from a diverse range of talks, workshops, and networking opportunities.

• Josh: To be honest I had no idea what to expect other than something huge and something wild and wacky with lots of developers, designers and business leaders and everything Umbraco. Turned out that it blew all these ideas out of the park. It was really wacky, really wild, really techy, really businessy, really Umbraco-y and really fun. 
  

• Rob: This would have been my (counts on fingers...) tenth Codegarden, and every year they have gotten bigger, more professional, with greater scope of speakers.  It was also the first Codegarden that I presented as a speaker - it was such an honour to be chosen to do so, and I loved every minute of it.  However, the core of the Umbraco Community is well represented and Codegarden has not lost it's "friendly" atmosphere.

What was your first impression of the event?

• Joseph: The atmosphere was incredibly welcoming, with people being genuinely friendly and warm right from the start. As an introvert, this initially felt a bit daunting, but it also provided a great opportunity to step out of my comfort zone and engage with others more actively.

• Josh: That Umbraco takes this event really seriously. Serious fun but equally serious about offering a fantastic product to the world and being an important player in the CMS market.

What talks did you attend?

• Joseph: I attended a wide variety of talks, and each one was quite interesting and inspiring in its own way. The technical talks covered a broad range of topics, that would provide insights into the latest developments in the Umbraco community. The talks including: Deep Dive on Umbraco Cloud Deployments, Asynchronous All the Things, Integrated SSR and Caching in Umbraco… In addition to the technical talks, there were also sessions focused on mental health and well-being.

• Josh: Lots: SSR and Caching in Umbraco, What's cooking in Umbraco 14, Github CodeQL, Umbraco Deploy, UmbracCoffee, Umbraco Workflow – what's next, Let’s package it up, What's coming in Umbraco 15, Umbraco Cloud deployments, Improving an architecture of an existing site and Where's the eject button on this thing?

• Rob: I did the "talking" track - i.e., I stayed the majority of the time in the social space talking to people.  I did attend one or two talks, and the umbraCoffee sessions (where I managed to talk Callum into getting all those that travelled from Australia up on the small 2-seater couch for the first session).  Everything was high quality, and I look forward to all the session recordings being published so I can go back and review them all.

Most interesting talk/session?

• Joseph: There were many interesting sessions at the event, including the dinner on Thursday, which was very fun and “friendly”. However, the talk I enjoyed the most was given by Heather Floyd on "Improving the Architecture of an Existing Site." Her presentation was incredibly insightful and practical, focusing on common problems that can occur in long-running sites, particularly concerning legacy document types, settings, and content that can impact performance. She discussed the challenges of maintaining and optimising older sites and provided tips on how to undertake a cleanup project. She shared useful suggestions on simplifying and consolidating datatypes, content types, and templates, which can significantly improve site performance and maintainability.

• Josh: Super enjoyed “Where’s the eject button on this thing?”. It was a light and very humorous presentation about how to do frontend development when you are a backend developer.

• Rob: Heather Floyd's presentation on upgrading old Umbraco Sites was chock full of practical advice, very useful for what we're doing with all the Umbraco Upgrade projects at the moment moving from Umbraco 7 or 8 to Umbraco 13+.

What's the main thing you're going to remember?

• Josh: The enrichment factor and how much you learn when interact visit and see people in person. There is another dimension to this that always being behind a screen!

• Rob: The time spent with the team, meeting new people, fixing the demo for my presentation half an hour before I was due to present (I broke it on purpose - had to see what would happen under certain conditions - it became a feature of the talk!).  Having Emma Burstow (head of Developer Relations at Umbraco) come up to me after one of her presentations to thank me for the friendly attentive face in the front row (apparently it helped!).

Who did you meet?

• Josh: So many people! People from the Umbraco community in Holland, England, Australia, Germany and more. I met the creator of uMarketingSuite and the creator of Umbraco Commerce.

• Rob: I caught up with several members of the community that have been around a long time - Andy Butland, Ravi Motha, Matt and Lucy Brailsford, Fuji Kusaka, just to name a few.  Some of those early community members are now on staff at Umbraco HQ, and it's great to be able to talk to them in person.

How about Denmark? Did you get to see anything of the city? Any highlights? Best food?

• Joseph: It was fantastic that there was a tour of Odense city on the last day. The tour guide did an excellent job of sharing the stories and history of the city, making the experience both educational and enjoyable. We visited some famous attractions such as the birthplace of Hans Christian Andersen. And we also saw many old buildings, each with its own unique charm and historical significance.

• Josh: Denmark was very cool in more ways than one… if you get my drift ;-). It was actually very cold unfortunately this summer so that made some of the days less pleasant and we had taken mostly summer clothes. However, Denmark itself was a very awesome place. Beautiful buildings, very warm and open people. Excellent hospitality.

• Rob: Josh and I walked around Odense the first day so I could show him around a little bit - he was then able to show Joseph and Ben around the following day while I was at the Business Summit. There's a street food location called Storms Pakhus (Storms Pakhus Odense Street food) that has lots of different vendors under the one roof with lots of seating, etc. - very popular in summer, many of the Codegarden attendees go there to catch up outside of the conference.  It seems to be an old converted storage/packing shed.

Who did you go to the event with? Share a good moment!

• Joseph: Rob, Josh, Ben, the highlight was the Bingo dinner!

• Josh: Went to the event with several colleagues including two from the YIT team. Very awesome to spend time with them. Really enjoyed sitting down and eating burgers together at the local restaurant. We also had front row seats in Rob Foster’s presentation, supporting him eagerly through it.

• Rob: his year, for the first time ever, we had the luxury of sending 3 members of our team to Codegarden - perfect for building on the relationships garnered over Teams in meetings, everyone got to know each other just that little bit better.  Loved spending time with them.

Are you going to come back? Why?

• Joseph: Absolutely, and it would be even better to go to Umbraco Codegarden with everyone else in our team. The event exceeded my expectations in so many ways. The sessions were incredibly informative and provided valuable insights that I can apply to our development. The warm and welcoming atmosphere of both the conference and the city of Odense made the experience truly memorable. One of the main reasons is to take the opportunity to do more networking with the amazing people there, which I didn't fully manage to do this time.

• Josh: Definitely. Super enjoyed it and learnt heaps. I valued very much after this event how hugely rewarding and important these conferences can be both on a professional level but equally on a social one.

• Rob: Definitely.  I have only missed a couple of Codegardens over the years, and intend to keep going as many times as I can.  The opportunities for meeting people in person, learning from each other and building potential partnerships are huge.

Such a fun time!

The team also had was recognised for the long trip taken to make it to Codegarden from Australia. The team at umbraCoffee got all the attendees who came from Australia to get up the stand and share their journey. It was awesome to see so many people come from far away, and to catch up with all the other developers who the team know from attending the Australian Meet ups throughout the year.

The team caught up with former colleagues they had worked with in the past, and apparently had a very very good run playing Umbraco Bingo!

The team also had time to explore around, and had a really good time spending quality face-to-face time together. Josh, who lives in the Netherlands, was so excited to see the team that he sneaked up on them on the train!