Paul Sterling's Blog

There are lots of words used to describe Umbraco Codegarden09, my two favorite being Ole Erling!  This year's Codegarden had 174 attendees, loads of speakers, 36 open space sessions, 1,000's of lines of code, 100's of liters of beer, and some - one of a kind - bed sheets printed with a goofy picture of the Umbraco Core Team and MVPs taken home by the lucky Umbraco bingo winner.

Venue

The venue this year in Copenhagen was Kedelhallen and it was fantastic - plenty of space to interact and collaborate, a cozy cafe, lawns filled with chairs, and the weather was absolutely perfect (a Codegarden tradition).  Personally, I had a fantastic experience meeting many new people in the community and (finally) meeting people I interact with daily in Twitter and the Umbraco Forum.  I never had a minute where I thought 'what should I do now?' as friendly Umbraco people were eager to share, discuss, and chat - this is one of the things that makes Umbraco Codegarden unique among conferences. 

Real Time Input

Between the Core Team retreat and Codegarden the week spent with Umbraco people was exhausting, inspiring, and extraordinarily productive.  As many know already, one of my main projects is Commerce for Umbraco and I received excellent and relevant feedback from a number of attendees regarding items that work well and items that don't work as well.  This type of feedback is the most valuable for an open source project as it gives us a direction.  Based on the feedback and experiences of the project's users we expect a full release in approximately 60-days - hurray!

Umbraco Store

Another area that I focus some of my time and money in is the development of the Umbraco Store (http://store.umbraco.org/) and this received feedback as well.  During an open space session we discussed integrating the three current package repositories (projects on our.umbraco.org, package repository, and the Umbraco Store) into a  more unified user experience.  From this session we created very clear, actionable items with assigned owners and, with some luck and a bit of work, we'll have prototype of the integrated experience in a few weeks.  Look for more posts from me on this topic as we continue to develop it.  One interesting item is that the reluctance to commercialize one's work by selling packages in the Umbraco Store was noticeably absent in discussions this year.

Our Umbraco

As you no doubt already know, the new Umbraco community site was unveiled at Codegarden09 (http://our.umbraco.org/).  This site sets the standard for a much higher level of collaboration between members of the Umbraco community.  If you haven't seen it yet, go check it out now.

Umbraco ASP.NET MVC

Some of the biggest news is the announcement of Umbraco's adoption of the ASP.NET MVC framework for the v5 release.  At Codegarden this was the announcement that generated the greatest buzz.  At the Core Team retreat this was the focus of our discussions and some prototypes were created to prove the proof of concept.  This is a very exciting direction for Umbraco and one that you'll no doubt see many more posts and discussions about in the coming year.

Scale and Momentum

Finally, as an attendee of past Codegardens one could not miss that the scale of the event was actually, well, big.  I think this year (2009) marks the point at which the Umbraco Project is bigger than Niels, or the Core Team, it is truly a community project that is made by, and for, the people that use it.  I see this as a tremendous accomplishment and one that is irreversible. 

  See you next year!

Here's a cheeky video made at the Core Team planning retreat at the end of a long day spent discussing v.Next of Umbraco.

Hope to see you at CodeGarden 09 on Monday!

-Paul

…as if you really needed any more.  Here's my take.

Come join the annual umbraco developer conference in Wonderful Copenhagen on June 22nd - 23rd. Two days for insights, eye-openers, great conversations and friendly people.
More information and registration here:  umbraco.org/codegarden

 

 

-Paul

In preparation for this year's Umbraco Codegarden 2009 in Copenhagen I decided to try and obtain an award-travel itinerary from Seattle to Copenhagen.  For last year's Codegarden I purchased an itinerary on SAS in coach for nearly $2,000 (USD).  Although SAS offers a very convenient direct Seattle to Copenhagen flight, the level of comfort was low and the cost high - I arrived tired, stinky and found working (which we were there to do) very difficult.

Having heard the extreme pessimism surrounding the ability to actually locate and book one of these itineraries without being forced to use the higher point requirement (200,000), I was not very optimistic.  I collect most of my award points in Continental's OnePass program and also have an American Express card which earns points that are transferrable to the OnePass program.  All in I had 96,000 points available in the OnePass program.  Note:  these points do seem to add up fast as I had previously booked an award itinerary in December 2007 for Seattle to Copenhagen. 

Continental provides an online booking engine for award travel and allows you to book on partner airlines as well.  My first attempts were fruitless, but a bit of perseverance paid off and I was able to locate an itinerary from Vancouver, BC, Canada (about 30 minutes from my home, hooray!) to Amsterdam in Business class on Northwest for 100,000 points.  Good enough, the dates fit perfectly and, while Northwest Business class isn't Virgin's Upper class, not having to sit in coach for a 10+ hour flight is a huge benefit.  I booked it entirely online (including the purchase of the additional 4,000 points I needed) and received immediate confirmation.  Kudos Continental!

All that was left was to book from Amsterdam to Copenhagen.  As it turned out I had just enough points in my SAS EuroBonus account to book a very convenient itinerary, not in Business class but since the flight is only 80-minutes long it's not of much concern.  SAS also provides an online booking engine and I was able to locate, book, and confirm this itinerary in less than 15-minutes.  Kudos SAS!

Granted this itinerary is not quite as direct as Seattle to Copenhagen nonstop, however the extra couple of hours in travel time will be made up for by the more comfortable seating…at least I hope so.  In addition, the total cost covering taxes and fees was less than $230 (USD), just a fraction of what I could've otherwise spent.  As far as the level of booking difficulty and time-required - while it certainly took longer than sending a request to a travel agent and receiving a complete itinerary in return, it did not require more than one-hour of effort in total, I consider that a fair trade-off.