Key takeaways from Codegarden 2022
The Codegarden conference is created and arranged by Umbraco, which is a company known for their content management system. According to their own website, Umbraco CMS is “the world's leading open-source content management system built on the latest .NET (ASP.NET Core) technology, [and] offers all you need to create a powerful, user-friendly website”
Simployer are using the Umbraco CMS for several of our websites. In fact, the website you are currently visiting is built using the Umbraco CMS. In order to learn more, get inspired and continue our Umbraco journey we wanted to attend this conference. Three developers from team Learning and two developers from team Knowledge Services packed a nine-seat Mercedes Vito and drove all the way from Sarpsborg, Norway to Odense, Denmark. Some of us have been working with Umbraco CMS for a long time and some of us are pretty fresh in the Umbraco world.
For three days we attended talks held by speakers from Umbraco (of course), Microsoft, Spotify, Google and other members of the Umbraco community. We enjoyed some quality team building, got an insight into the future of Umbraco and did a lot of socializing with both other users of Umbraco as well as the people working there.
Our key take-aways:
There is a lot of functionality in Umbraco that we are not utilizing
We got to see different ways Umbraco could be used to create different kinds of solutions. We also got a glimpse of features in Umbraco that we were not aware of, amongst other things that Umbraco has an add-on that will integrate Azure Cognitive Search with your CMS.
Using Umbraco headless will be part of the architecture for our next solution
The team has discussed using a custom Umbraco CMS headless, with a separate frontend built with SvelteKit, for our next solution. After attending Codegarden we got the confirmation we needed that this is the direction we want to go and how we are going to build our next product. Everyone is very excited for this, especially the front-end developer that has only (almost) been doing C# since he started at Simployer earlier this year.
Insight into the next versions of Umbraco
We are pretty invested in Umbraco in team Learning (and team Web) at Simployer. Getting to know the roadmap and plans for the future of Umbraco was insightful as we are going to continue to use Umbraco as our CMS. We just spent a lot (and I mean A LOT, shout out to Lars) of time migrating all our Umbraco 8 solutions to Umbraco 9, and it is nice to see that this effort has been worth it.
A big part of going to Codegarden is networking
I’ve been to other conferences, but the biggest difference between them and Codegarden is the focus on networking and socializing. We have met and talked to many different interesting people both from the Umbraco community and the employees at the Umbraco HQ, and hence grown our Umbraco network.
The new buzzword is DXP
Specifically, Composable DXP. Gartner’s definition of a DXP is “A digital experience platform (DXP) is a well-integrated and cohesive set of technologies designed to enable the composition, management, delivery and optimization of contextualized digital experiences across multi-experience customer journeys”. Read more about DXP here if you want to know more. Even though DXP is a new buzzword, we have been doing something similar for a while at Simployer.
Attending a conference (and especially going on a road trip) together is high quality team and cross team building
Might be that we were stuck together in a car for 9+ hours, two times, during four days but doing this together brought us closed as a team and as colleagues. We got to know each other more, shared a lot of laughs and used the talks we attended as a base for discussion later.
Last thoughts
After attending the conference, we feel inspired, exited and got confirmation that we are on the right path for the future ahead. Now we will continue building the Simployer DXP.
