Umbraco Codegarden 2019

Inspired by Umbraco version 8 which was released in February, this year’s Codegarden was again a complete success. There to take it all in was again the team of Gold Partner byte5, which was excited to be honoured with an Umbraco award in 2019. Another thing which excited the byte5-ers was the increase in German-speaking Codegarden visitors.

This may, over 700 Umbracians went to Odense to network and learn interesting first-hand insights from the Umbraco headquarters: The Codegarden is the world’s largest Umbraco conference. This year, the main event was not only preceded by the Gold Partner Summit with around 100 participants, which of course also included byte5 as the first German Gold Partner. Additionally, the exclusive Umbraco Retreat was held for the first time which was all about – in the spirit of the open source – discussing, coding and joint work on Umbraco.

The start of the actual event was again extremely well attended with 300 people: it was the legendary pre-party in the Umbraco HQ, which this time was held in a Bavarian style. What followed was three days full of sessions on a range of topics and for every level of Umbraco expertise. The latest Umbraco version v8 put everybody in a good mood, which was reinforced by the newly published roadmap, which contained exciting news. While Umbraco will be implemented with .NET Core within the next few years, another new release is just around the corner: Umbraco Headless will be published in 2019. The introduction of a high-performance rich text editor and the complete revision of the popular grid editor are also on the agenda.

Another novelty was the introduction of the daily broadcast of the UmbraCoffee livestream on YouTube, through which Umbracians who were not able to attend could follow the goings-on live. On the last night, the infamous Umbraco bingo was held, where Chief Unicorn Niels Hartvig dressed as Donald Trump and led his guests through the game. Umbraco co-founder Per Ploug (disguised as Vladimir Putin) had a surprise appearance – it was a very amusing evening, not only for the byte5 team.

There was also another highlight for the byte5 team: byte5 received the Umbraco “Best Content App” award for the Umbraco 8 app “Linked Nodes” which our CPO Sören Deger had developed in winter.