I had just gotten over the post-Codegarden blues when I was back on a plane to Denmark and reunited with the Community Teams for our annual visit - here's what we got up to.
After all our travels from various parts of the world we met in Storms for a lovely catch up. Ema and Sebastiaan made sure we were all suitably filled with plenty of good food and drinks before the visit truly kicked off. I was excited to get cracking this year as it was announced at Codegarden that I had joined the Backoffice Team so I couldn't wait to get together with them.
Thursday began with a brilliant talk from Niels on 'Mounting UI in the New Backoffice', which demonstrated all the interesting and cool ways Umbraco is evolving to be easier to manage and maintain across various types of projects and clients.
We then got together with our various teams and I took part with the Backoffice Team in my first ever Hackathon where I attempted to download and install a preview of Umbraco V.14. I was testing the documentation I had helped create to make sure it could be followed and made sense to any new user. It was a huge learning curve and issues did come up so a worthwhile experiment.
After getting my head well and truly tested by an incredible insight into the coding, we finished up and headed out for the evening.
HQ had arranged a lovely boat ride down the Odense River which ended at the local Zoo where we were able to see some animals before sitting down to dinner in a fabulous setting.
Much fun and laughter was had including a 'open-sourced' speech by Ema, we piled onto a partybus and headed back to our hotels.
Friday was an early start (so a bit fuzzy for some!), we met back at HQ at 8am and each team shared information about the day before.
The sustainability team went to a local power plant which uses the renewable energy from a local Facebook data centre to heat and power home across Denmark which sounded fascinating!
We then regrouped with our various teams to complete what we had previously started and now we were ready to join the discussion groups with the HQ we had each signed up for.
I had a great session with the Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Team along with the Events Team where we discussed how Umbraco (and the tech industry as a whole) can do more to support anyone who is interested in joining. How we can make everyone feel welcome and at home.
The day ended with a fun quiz hosted by Kim via a really cool app called Kahoot which we played all together along with HQ which was very entertaining and prizes were won!
HQ then hosted a delicious cocktails hour whilst a live piantist played in the background, and before long the logs were bought into the office for Hammershlagen and games of beer pong began!
It was great to hang out and chat to members of HQ, to get to know them and share the time and space together.
It's was two full on fun days with fab people. We all parted ways tired but with big smiles and tons of appreciation for each other.
Once again another great meetup hosted by HQ, thank you Umbraco and hopefully see you all next year!
If you want to know more the Communuity Teams and if you want to get involved head to > > > https://community.umbraco.com/
Sophie doesn't only help us catch out any glitches on projects but she takes time to make suggestions for improvements. With her 10 years+ experience she is able to ensure our work is at a consistently high standard in terms of functionality, user experience and design.
