The Happenings of Codegarden 2018

Last week, for the fourteenth time, the biggest Umbraco conference worldwide took place: Codegarden. Of course, for the team of byte5 attending is a matter of honour. After all, there’s no other place where you can listen to that many quality talks, meet hundreds of community members at once and at the same time have Umbraco-typical business entertain you.

After less than a month ago, Umbraco-Festival Deutschland had given first insights into the topics that move the community in 2018, last week at Codegarden topics like Headless, the GDPR, AI and Umbraco version 8 and many more were thoroughly discussed.

byte5 has been an Umbraco gold partner for seven years, so of course for CEO Christian Wendler and COO Chris Köhler were again part of the gold partner summit two days prior to the festival. To this event, every Umbraco gold partner is invited to help contribute to the project’s future. With 70 gold partners, this year’s summit was bigger than ever before. Many new and old gold partners exchanged their thoughts on the further development of Umbraco, on the many new additions and potentials. And Chris adds: “There’s a noticeable amount of support for a quick development of Umbraco 8, in which byte5 will also play a part.”

As it is appropriate for an Umbraco conference, Codegarden 2018 kicked off with a pre-party on the night before the festival. In the historic home of Umbraco HQ, beverages from the „Drinks Pull Request“ were consumed by the litre and glasses were raised to the fourteenth Codegarden while the sun downed over Odense.

On Wednesday morning, CG could finally begin – with a keynote given by Chief Unicorn Niels Hartvig of course! The Umbraco founder emphasised that the CMS’s foundation is its community. Umbraco has grown mature and this is due to the efforts of its strong community. The headquarter’s objective is to keep providing a real open source system and have an open mindset for its environment.

In order to keep being successful, Niels encouraged the community to participate actively: whether with a contribution to the documentation or pull requests or something entirely different. By the way, Niels’s Codegarden keynote was in many ways similar to the one he held at Umbraco-Festival Deutschland three weeks prior and which you can watch in our YouTube playlist.

Before the Chief Unicorn finished his keynote, he gave a technical titbit to the Codegarden community which we don’t want to keep from you: a preview of Umbraco v8! Curious? Check out the preview yourself! Got questions on the new Umbraco version? Send us an email! As a gold partner, byte5 is informed about all details on version 8 and is happy to help.

Vitaly Friedman’s talk “Dirty Little Tricks from the Dark Corners of Front-End“ was accompanied by general euphoria. In his session, the web guru and co-founder of the Smashing Magazine gave a lot of small tips to do big things in front end optimising, especially in terms of performance. “Vitaly really engages with the audience, there’s not one second of boredom in his talks. My highlight of his session was when he presented a responsive and fully functional check-out within an e-mail”, says byte5 CPO Sören Deger.

One of the main topics at this year’s Codegarden was Headless – there were four sessions on this new buzz. HQ’s own Mads Rasmussen and Rune Strand who had already given a talk on Headless at the German Umbraco festival, did not only astonish their audience with the website of their fictional karaoke live band “Slave and Eagle”, but also with the website’s many Headless features. They also released a free preview version of Headless Umbraco. Download it, check it out and give the HQ your feedback on Umbraco Headless!

Live from Codegarden: The weekly YouTube format umbraCoffee in which hosts Marcin Zajkowski and Callum Whyte talk about everything Umbraco aired four specials live from the festival. Joined on the umbraCoffee sofa by guests from the community, Callum and Marcin talked about all the goings-on at Codegarden. Did you miss the live stream? Of course, you can watch all four umbraCoffees on YouTube.

Codegarden also means it’s time for awards! After the HQ introduced five new Umbraco Awards categories, ten projects were honoured with an award at this year’s festival – e.g. for Best Editing Experience or Best Case Study. Additionally, 16 Umbracians were awarded an MVP for the first time. 18 previous MVP’s were honoured again with this award, among them UFD speakers Marcin Zajkowski and Dave Woestenborghs. See the list of all 2018 MVP’s on the official Umbraco blog. Congratulations to all who with their contributions help make the CMS and its community stronger each year!

Anyone who has ever been to an Umbraco community event knows that interesting sessions and colleagues exchanging experiences is not close to all there is to it. What else was going on at CG 2018? #CGrunners who bravely met each morning to go jogging, creative breaks for DIY shirts, lunch-time meditation, karaoke with Slave and Eagle, boating at sundown … and of course bingo! But this part, we’ll conscientiously keep under wraps… Just this much: It was a blast.

Codegarden 2018 is over. Next year’s date has already been set, though. Anyone who’s got curious now and who wants to experience the world’s biggest Umbraco conference themselves, should definitely attend from 22 to 25 May 2019. Super Early Bird tickets are available now!

So … Codegarden 2018 has come and gone. How did the byte5 team like it? CTO Marcel says: “From a technical point of view, my CG highlight this year was definitely v8! Other than that: networking, meeting friends – a big class reunion.” And Sören agrees: “The deep insights we got into the new Umbraco version were great.” And being the Codegarden veteran he is, Sören has high praise for the host: “The organisation and the venue’s arrangement were top-notch!”

Our summary after five days of Codegarden: more than 600 guests, 42 sessions, 3 workshops, 1 masterclass given by Vitaly Friedman, many fantastic after-parties and a community in top form.

Dearest Headquarter, we say SuperTak for the great pictures and an even greater event!