Codegarden 2025

Introduction

I've been attending Umbraco conferences since the UK Festival in 2017. Before that I just participated in the forums and wrote blog posts or made videos. I didn't realise how friendly the Umbraco community really was.

At the UK Festival in 2017 I was very shy, (still am) and I didn't know anyone, but there were some lovely members of the community who included me in their conversations, let me sit or stand with them and asked if I was enjoying it. Tim Payne, Andy Felton, Emma Burstow and Lotte Pitcher. And because they started conversations with me and let me sit with them I got talking to their friends too, Jeavon Leopold, Janae Cram and Kyle Weems. This was the first time I realised I had found my people, and what I mean by that is kind people who are interested in making other people feel welcome and included.

So ever since then I have been excited to go to these Umbraco conferences, to make new friends and catch up with the ones I made at previous conferences.

This is all to try and describe the feeling of excitement and joy that I have when going to Codegarden. If you have ever been to a local meetup or even a National Umbraco event like the UK Festival, Umbraco Spark or DUUG Fest then you will know what I mean, a little, but Codegarden takes it to a new level.

This year I was going with my ClerksWell colleagues Sarah Nicholson (Tech Lead) and Kateryna Ovsyannykova (CEO). Kat came for the business summit last year, but headed home on the Wednesday. And it will be no surprise to you that this year she stayed for the whole event.

I travelled with Sarah to the event on the Tuesday morning and managed to get to Odense by the evening, just in time to check into the hotel and get to Storms for some food before the pre party.

Established Groups

It's so weird, I get really excited to meet everyone, yet when I got to the hotel to check in and I saw people I knew in a group chatting at the bar, I turned my back and pretended I hadn't seen them yet. I think I struggle with social situations where groups have already been formed. I know they would all be lovely and include me but I didn't have the courage to go and speak to them yet.

It was the same at Storms, we went and picked our food, I chose a Waffle with ice cream as I'd already eaten a slice of pizza at the airport and Sarah chose a gyros.

Sarah eating her gyros

We were sat on rows of tables next to all these people I was excited to see, but I had my back to them and was hoping they didn't notice me. What is wrong with me?

Pre-party

After Storms, we went over to Umbraco HQ for the pre-party. I wanted to make Sarah welcome and introduce her to lots of people, I did do that and with Kat too, but there was a distraction this year, in the form of a pool table. The wonderful team at Perplex had bought a pool table for the HQ team. It was a great way for me to chat to people and loosen up and relax whilst playing a game that I love. I managed to stay on for a while but I'm sure after some time people were wanting me to lose which inevitably happened.

That time on the table really helped me to get into my comfort zone and feel more confident talking to people. I was there, in the Codegarden spirit and ready for the event.

Pool table at the pre-party

After previous years of staying out too late or drinking one too many I made a conscious effort to hold back this year and I was glad I did. I felt fresh on the Wednesday morning for the first day of Codegarden.

Day 1

One of my favourite parts of Codegarden is seeing the new MVPs go up on stage to collect their award. for the last year I had been mentoring my colleague Deba so it was great to see him collect his award. And over the years I have danced next to and played a lot of pool with my friend Marc Love from uSkinned who I had nominated several times in the past so it was really great to see him get one too. There are so many others who also got their first MVP this year, some of which I was like "haven't you got one already?" but honestly they all deserve it.

MVP Pin Badges

There was a nice touch this year for the MVPs, they had made special lanyards for us and gave use pin badges with a year on each one so we could collect them for each new year. I was lucky enough to collect my 8th MVP award this year.

New MVP pin badges

Videos

I did a lot of filming of what it's like at Codegarden this year, I wanted to capture the atmosphere for those who have never been or for those who couldn't make it but wanted to see what was going on. That's why I've added those videos to this blog post. I hope you enjoy them.

Codegarden at lunch time

Lunch

The food this year was much better in my opinion. They listened to our feedback and seemed to cater for the majority and give us meat options whilst still providing a vegetarian/vegan option. This was very much appreciated and didn't go unnoticed.

Tipi tent fun and games at Codegarden

Awards

This was the first year that any of my packages had been nominated so I was excited to be part of it. I didn't expect to win because I knew there were a lot of great packages who had also been nominated. In my head I had a speech ready, I was going to thank Start Bootstrap for creating the theme in the first place, and the Umbraco community for contributing to Clean and helping me to keep it going. When it didn't win the best package award I was secretly hoping it would be added to the hall of fame, but brutally they just announced that no package was getting added this year, and I realised you have to win more than once to be added to the hall of fame lol.

Wednesday Night Pool

It has become tradition for me and a few people to go and play pool at Sharks in Odense on the Wednesday night. This year was no exception although there were fewer of us. I blame Steve Temple for going too hard at the preparty and needing to take it easy the next night. He normally brings around 8 people with him. It was still really good though, I got to play against Marc from uSkinned, Dwight from Fresh Egg, Dean Leigh, Rich from Manifesto, and an American guy I forget the name of. We had a good chat whilst playing and I found out that Dwight was from my home town and we knew a lot of the same places and faces.

Thursday

Walking from Odeon and Cabinn to DOK5000 for Codegarden

The Thursday is where most of the technical talks happen, I was really excited by the talk Niels gave about how to extend the new backoffice. This was the first time it had been demoed to me and I didn't feel overwhelmed and it seemed to just make sense.

Day 2 lunch and getting front row seats for the MCP talk

Search

Ken showed us how easy it is to swap out the different search providers in the upcoming version of Umbraco. I think this is a great idea and would love to see a set community written implementations for different search providers so we can all share them and make using them as easy as it looked in the demo.

Scavenger hunt prize collection time

MCP

The standout talk for me was by Phil Whittaker and Matt Wise about MCP. This feels like when ChatGPT first came out and we were all realising its potential. Now I use Copilot most days to help me with menial tasks or rewrite something.

This MCP talk showed us the future of developing with Umbraco. Phil and Matt had made it possible for you to talk to Copilot or Claude or other Language Learning Models (LLM) and ask it to do things on your Umbraco site. They gave examples such as asking it to move all of the unused data types into a new folder away from the used data types. They also asked it to create a blog post about a certain topic, it understood the document type structure, all of the required properties and how to fill them all in as well as creating separate content items elsewhere like category and author so it could be picked on the blog article.

MCP is very new but very exciting, we are only limited by our own imagination. I'm so excited to use the Fridays that ClerksWell gives me so I can experiment with this.

Matt's Neurodivergence talk

Matt Brailsford gave an inspiring and emotional talk about his journey of discovering he has ADHD, ASD and Dyslexia.
His illustrations were fantastic as always but they were so powerful in this talk, making it very emotional.
I was so proud of Matt for getting up and talking about this topic. Not only did he talk about his journey but he shared useful tips for people to take away and start using for themselves or others in the workplace.

Bingo

It was great that Kat was staying for Bingo this year and Sarah was there too. I loved seeing their faces whilst watching all of the craziness unfold. It was very entertaining, funny and bonkers. Where else would 600 people play musical chairs and the winner walk away with a 39kg wheel of cheese?

Disco

The disco was good this year and it was cool to have the saxophone guy but I felt a lot of the songs were catering for saxophone guy to play along to rather than for us to dance to. This turned out to be a good thing for me though, it meant I didn't stay out as late as normal because I was talking the next morning.

Giving my Umbraco Cloud CI/CD talk

This was my second time talking at Codegarden officially, I did a lightning talk a couple of years ago, but that doesn't count.

The last time I gave a talk at Codegarden, it was rushed, I was trying to do 10 live demos in a 30 minute slot. I really wanted to make sure I didn't make the same mistake again. This year it was a 45 minute slot and I had already given the talk at the UK Festival in November.

I had a session with Adam the speaker coach which was really helpful, he gave me some great tips such as increasing the size of my screenshots, removing the branding from every page, reducing the words on the screen and loads more.

I was really nervous, I hadn't anticipated so many people turning up on a Friday let alone to watch my talk. After 10 mins of technical issues I gave my talk. I really enjoyed it and it seemed to go down well. 

Hackathon

I was disappointed to miss the beginning of the hackathon because of giving a talk, but I was really happy to catch the second half of it. I was excited about extending the backoffice. Sebastiaan and Lotte helped me to get Lotte's opinionated package starter kit installed which has some examples of extending the backoffice that you can mess around with. I was sat opposite Richard Ockerby who was playing with the new Umbraco MCP. He was adding other MCPs too like one for being able to modify files and other that can browse the web. Putting all these tools together for the LLM to be able to use is so powerful.

Conclusion

This year I took it easy with the late nights and drinking, I had fun with my colleagues and former colleagues. I made some new friends and caught up with old friends. I gave a talk and learned a lot from other people's talks.

This has definitely been one of my favourite Codegardens, I feel like I am maturing, realising what I do and don't enjoy and taking it easy. I am excited for Codegarden being in Copenhagen next year, as it will reduce my travel time by at least 2 hours each way.

Thank you to all of the events team at Umbraco and everyone who was involved in making it such a memorable event. See you next year.