Codegarden, July 2022

Codegarden is Umbraco’s annual conference based out of the home of Umbraco, Odense – Denmark. The conference brings together developers, designers and anyone interested or enthusiastic about Umbraco from all over the world for a few days of learning, networking and community building. Attendees have the opportunity to participate in workshops, attend talks and connect with the others in the Umbraco community, whether that is a morning run, a tech talk over coffee or any of the other social events that happen throughout the week in Odense.

There were some truly fantastic talks across the week, with a few common themes and threads between certain discussions that armed me with a few key takeaways from Codegarden.

Firstly, as part of the Gold Partner day (that takes place the day before Codegarden officially starts) there were some great roadmap sessions about the future of the Umbraco platform. Within one of the breakout sessions there was a valuable talk on ‘The principles of persuasion’ by Robert. B. Cialdini and how they can be applied to digital.

For clients whose business success can be determined on a 0.1% conversion increase, this talk really resonated with me. Of course, it is not all unique thinking, but we at true build success measurement frameworks for each of our projects and these principles can help us provide context for our CRO strategies.

Andy Eva-Dale gave a great talk on Jamstack and sustainability. This talk was really great as it provided some excellent insight into (particularly) the positive impact that microservices can have on the carbon footprint of your digital presence. Sustainability, is something that we as an agency and the industry are continually improving on, so it was positive to hear about and set internal targets for future and existing clients.

Two of the other common threads across the week were the ever growing capabilities of Umbraco Cloud (which is becoming more and more impressive!) and discussing the composable DXP architecture.

A composable DXP allows complete flexibility around the solutions that are integrated. Each tool can be selected based upon its ability to meet the specific needs for you, your users and your platform and we were lucky enough to be invited to talk about our wonderful collaboration with Aardman on this very subject.

The Aardman platform is built on the Umbraco CMS; we spoke to the attendees about the advantages of Umbraco, what it really means to have a scalable platform, how a composable architecture allowed us to facilitate a platform for growth and how it helped us provide Aardman with a multi-site platform for all of their fan sites (like wallaceandgromit.com and shaunthesheep.com).

It was awesome to share the great work from our team with a wider audience and also focus on the technical decisions that allow us to create something so fun and playful, all whilst being super performant!

The team at Umbraco clearly were fans of the Aardman project as we were shortlisted for best designed site with Aardman and won the Jury’s choice award at the Umbraco awards, which were hosted live at Codegarden. Scarily, it meant that I had to provide an impromptu acceptance speech on behalf of Aardman and all of the team at true.