Codegarden 15 blues...

Wikipedia:

Codegarden Blues:

The vacuum Umbraco Codegarden attendees experience starting right after the event. This feeling can last until the purchase of a ticket for the next Codegarden.

There you have it. Codegarden 2015 is over and we all have the blues. Our usual work has taken over again, deadlines to catch, bugs to solve,... Then again, we met a lot of interesting people and captured loads of teasers that we will try look into asap. Let's look back at this last edition...

Start

It kind of started by the end of March when we (my colleague Jan Vanuytrecht and myself) submitted our session proposal regarding the project we're working on at the moment. We titled our session 'We want a corporate Umbraco platform! Errr.. Sure!' and wanted to share our story with the community on how we solved some key aspects we were dealing with. Soon we received an email from Tim (HQ) saying that our session was approved. Wow, so cool.

The preparation of the session did take a huge amount of effort, of course right in the middle of major deadlines. Starting will full-text slides and ended up after several iterations with visual slides with almost no text at all. This was our first time presenting at such a big event, exiting times :-) Covering a big project like we intended to do brought us to a wide range of topics using a helicopter view. We might have been a little to ambitious in this case and learned that it probably could offer more value with less but more detailed topics, more on this later in this post. Nonetheless we ended up with a very good deal of mind sharing during the 3 Codegarden days, high five to the community!

We want a corporate Umbraco platforms! ERRR... Sure! from E2 Partners

Future

Exiting times ahead of us offering a lot of cool stuff to look out for. The new api, load balancing, umbraco.com release. On that last topic I did understand during open space that eventually this will enable the open sourcing of Courier. This would enable great improvement being introduced by the community. I like the focus on the core itself.

Bingo

Could write a lot of great things about the Bingo, but...
What happens at the Bingo stays at the Bingo :-)))

Open space

An interesting topic I attended during the open spaces was about strong typed models and on a broader level the choice of an architecture. A project architecture that includes design decisions supported by a combination of Umbraco packages. Certainly for newbies it's not quite clear how to set up an Umbraco project, loads of choices to make. I suggested a place on Our for documenting architectural designs, each explaining why certain concepts and/or packages were chosen. I would find that very informative myself.

At the last day during the open space wrap-up one of the conclusions about this Codegarden was that there was a lack of in-depth technical sessions this year. This seemed to be true to me too, also our session could have a technical deep dive but we had no clue upfront. Since search seemed a hot topic our Solr integration would be a nice topic. To fill the gap a bit we will write a few articles on this subject in the next few weeks and months.

People

Picture made by Douglas Robar

Codegarden is all about people and networking. Despite the fact that I'm a rather introvert person myself I find it very easy to get in contact with a huge amount of other attendees. It's such a welcoming community and sharing is key. Love it,

Another example is the picture on the left taken by Douglas Robar after Niels ordered a big banner with express delivery wishing my collegua Jan Vanuytrecht all the luck with his new born son, Viktor. How great and heartwarming is that!

Next

Codegarden left me with a trello board full of todo's.
I'll just end this post and start with my first todo:
use Umbraco + Articulate for my blog, I don't like Blogger :-)

Cheers,
Bart