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Grey Muir is an Analyst Developer at Cantarus and one of the latest additions to the Umbraco MVP family. Here, they share their reflections on their first ever Codegarden – and why it definitely won’t be the last.
From Hammerschlagen and a 600‑person game of musical chairs to game‑changing talks, Umbraco Codegarden showed me how a conference can become a spectacle.
I’ve been mulling over some variant of that sentence since attending this year’s Codegarden – as a CG first timer – and it’s been a bit funny to me how much it sounds like a PR piece. I don’t work for Umbraco, and I’ve always been a developer rather than a marketer, so how is it that Codegarden managed to plant such a line in my head?
One word: Community.
"Community" can have a lot of meanings, but what I’ve learned at Cantarus is that community means shared humanity. It speaks to what we do as a business and how we bring excellence into our work. Fostering inclusive and collaborative environments has always stood out to me as the Cantarus ethos, which is perhaps one of the many reasons I found the Umbraco community to be so easy to engage with.
The Umbraco community has a number of key phrases that we use: “H5YR!” (high five you rock), “Umbazing”, “Supertak”, but I think the core word that is on several stickers every year is “Friendly” – and it’s not just talk.
Every single person I met at Codegarden, every speaker I saw after their talk, and every HQ member took the friendly ethos to the extreme. Group discussions practiced the "pac-man" technique (essentially leaving space open for anyone who wants to join), and even beyond that, I found myself having various chats with people ad-hoc. I’ve been a regular attendee at meetup groups over the course of my involvement in the Umbraco community and they’ve always been really friendly, but I was blown away at how the organisers at Umbraco managed to maintain that small-group friendly atmosphere even in a crowd 30 to 40x times larger than typical meetups.
Anyway, I suppose I should stop for a moment to introduce myself as this is my first time writing a blog! My name is Grey, my pronouns are they/them and I’m a (new) Umbraco MVP! 🎉
At Cantarus, where I work as an Analyst Developer, we're deeply involved in the Umbraco community (regularly hosting the Manchester meetups) and it’s always something that has really meant a lot to me. I enjoy most things that developers enjoy: bouldering (more on that in a bit), video games, puzzles, and pretty much anything software-related... even a little hardware if I’m feeling brave.
This year’s Codegarden was my first, and it was also my first time in Denmark (a country that has very quickly gained a large amount of love from me). I’m also one half of the first parent-child Umbraco MVP dynamic duo, as my father Jonny Muir also received MVP this year!
I arrived in Denmark late on Monday, and by the time I reached Odense from Copenhagen it was already the early hours of Tuesday. From there, I attended the second day of the Umbraco MVP summit and had a chance to meet the incredibly talented and amazing collection of Umbraco MVPs in attendance. We got started early with some really interesting discussions around Umbraco features, and then I went to Boulders Odense for a ridiculously fun (and intense!) climbing session with some of the other MVPs from the summit (namely Joe Glombek, Owain Williams, and Mike Masey). Turns out, in addition to them being incredible developers, they’re all brilliant boulderers too!
After that, it was time for the Codegarden pre-party. This year's was pirate themed! From the rave cave, to the pool table, to the balcony it was fun to meet so many new people but also catch up with some familiar faces (shout out to my fellow Codecabin-2024ers). Also, to add a note for any fellow non-drinkers out there – the non-alcoholic selection was fantastic!
From this point on, I’ll highlight a few talks that stood out to me. If I were to discuss all the great talks, this blog post would blossom out even more than it already will – so I’ll do my best to keep it as brief as I can (which, admittedly, isn’t going to be that brief).
The keynote was amazing – it ranged from funny, to heartfelt, to a little terrifying when it was my turn to go up on stage to accept my MVP award. Luckily, my worry of tripping on the stage was entirely unfounded! It was an absolute honour to share that stage with such talented and wonderful folk. That moment of stepping onto the stage and seeing the audience was truly humbling.
As an Orchestration Advisory Board member, I was absolutely floored by “Orchestrate it all”, a talk by Lasse Fredslund, Rasmus John Pedersen, and Jordan McFarlane. They did an incredible job of addressing a complex topic in just 45 minutes, showing off Umbraco Compose. It goes without saying (given the whole advisory board thing) that I’m really invested in this product and I think it’s going to offer an amazing experience for anyone looking to bring content together in a really intuitive way. It'll also make my job easier when it comes to integrating external content into the system – a win for both clients and developers!
It was also brilliant to be present for a live recording of Candid Contributions. Lotte Pitcher and Emma Burstow have an absolutely fantastic energy on stage and it was great to see a fellow first-timer at Codegarden get the spotlight to talk about their experience (I’ve seen Eli Holderness speak at DDD North a few times, and they always knock it out of the park).
On Thursday, there were a few amazing talks about search that I really enjoyed. Callum Whyte gave one called “Advanced Search 101” which was – as always with Callum, having heard him speak at a meetup or two in the past – a fantastic blend of engaging and technical. He walked through the history of search in Examine, some pitfalls, and what the future has in store. There were key insights we can apply to Cantarus’ clients' search challenges – particularly around streamlining configuration on the client side while enhancing the user experience. It was facet-nating!
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Staying on the search bandwagon, Kenn Jacobsen did another incredible talk going into details of the upcoming search overhaul for Umbraco called “The Future of (Umbraco) Search”. It was super interesting to see a sneak peak of what’s in store for developers when it comes to search, and I’m very excited to get my hands on the new system when it’s released in any form (definitely one to keep an eye on release candidates for!). The changes that Kenn showed in this presentation will not only help simplify implementations for search generally, but also help with clients that want to switch search providers (and working at Cantarus has taught me that giving the client flexibility for the future can help build trust in that client-agency relationship!).
Hopping off search for a second, Phil Whittaker and Matthew Wise were just incredible in their ridiculously interesting deep dive into the MCP server they’ve been working on in “From Clicks to Commands: AI for Editors, Developers, and Everyone Else”. The idea of a natural language interface is one of the most interesting uses of generative AI that I’ve come across and I was blown away at what they were doing with it. Phil and Matt are both brilliant, and I knew from prior experience that their talk would be amazing (regardless of the topic), but it was amazing (or should I say umbazing…) to see how much expertise they’ve both developed in a relatively short amount of time! This talk sparked so many ideas in my head about how to use this technology to streamline repetitive tasks such as test data creation (how many times have you painstakingly gone through page creation having to fill out all the mandatory fields that aren’t relevant to the feature you’re putting under test…) so that we can focus on the truly exciting parts of Umbraco development!
I honestly could keep going for longer – the fact that even this post, as long as it is, is completely non-exhaustive is a testament to how much there is to do, and learn, at Codegarden. I could talk about Joe Kepley’s amazing insights on JMeter (it can do a lot more than I thought), or Jen Bradshaw and Martin Hoyle’s scientific investigation into cross-agency collaboration. In fact, there were talks that I heard brilliant things about that I didn’t even get to attend in person – I think I’m going to be busy watching talks from this year’s Codegarden for a while yet! I’m particularly looking forward to watching Dylan Beattie’s talk, “From Hot Metal to HTML: The Story of Type”, which unfortunately coincided with my train back to Copenhagen Airport.
There was also the sermon (don’t worry about it, it’s not a cult), the game of musical chairs, and the Umbraco Awards, hosted by the fantastic stage presence duo of Karla Santi and Andy Eva-Dale. The floppy disc scavenger hunt and Hammerschlagen were both really fun non-stage based activities. I could probably do a blog post of its own about the strategies behind Hammerschlagen.
There’s so much that goes into it, and so much effort and love poured in by Umbraco HQ – it made the entire experience magical. I really hope to attend the next Codegarden, and the one after that (and the one after that, and so on). If I had to choose a few words to describe Codegarden to anyone considering it next year – or at any point in the future – they'd be: authentic, electric, and, most importantly, friendly.
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