Umbraco Code garden ventured into its “20th anniversary” this year with the addition of the first ever Umbraco MVP summit on the Monday and Tuesday. Both myself and Jeavon attended the summit, taking part in the open spaces and enjoying good food! Clive later joined us for the pre-party on Tuesday.
Advice: If your boss offers to send you to Denmark on the Sunday before the MVP summit, take it! It’s not worth taking a 7:30 am flight to Denmark. However the upside is having a wonderful breakfast at Gatwick to fuel the journey. (This post will be very food focused!)
Monday MVP Summit
When I got to the summit I was greeted with my “save icon” lanyard and pins representing the MVP’s I obtained over the years.
Some more well-decorated than others!
Our time was spent attending open space talks that varied in subject such as how to bring new people into Umbraco, improving Umbraco meetups, AI, adopting newer versions of Umbraco and package development. Another notable presentation was Matt Brailsford’s talk on neurodivergence which I missed but caught up with later online.
We were then greeted with a lovely MVP dinner. I pretty much took a spoonful of everything! A mixture of potatoes, broccoli, grilled onions, picked cucumbers and veal with gravy.
Tuesday (MVP summit continued and preparty)
The remainder of the MVP summit was more open space discussions with other MVPs, and general networking amongst ourselves. I participated in “what features are missing in Umbraco.” A few things were raised, from Content locking, to granular permission controls for access to content.
After some healthy MVP summit lunch, it was time for more networking and then the workshops.
Workshops
There were a few happening simultaneously:
- Build Your Own Developer Blog with Umbraco 15 & Astro
- Web Hacking 101
- Building Blocks for Your Applications – Hosting Umbraco with Containers
- Harnessing Umbraco Engage: A Tailored Content Experience
I snuck in and attended the Web Hacking 101 and had a great time (thank you Steven for letting me join as I thought I'd signed up but didn’t!)
We participated in a small guided CTF (Capture the flag) event. We were provided with various tools to survey and identify exploits on an insecure Umbraco site. We used various tools like sublistr and burpsuite to gather intel on the site such as:
- Identifying other subdomains (dev, staging sites) associated with the Production website
- Performing crafted requests and analysing the responses for exploits such as abnormal response times for valid logins
- Brute force password attacks
- Session hijacking to exploit a cross site scripting vulnerability
I had a great time and found myself hunting for flags rather than listening to Steven explain! The slides/exercises were already online beforehand so I found myself going through his well-presented website to carry out the exercises. With Steven's permission, here are the exercises and slides: Home | Web Hacking 101
We had a dedicated website to submit our flags and competed against each other on a public scoreboard. Highly suggest attending if another workshop is planned. #h5yr
Pre-party
Following the workshop, it was time for some dinner at Storms and the pirate themed pre-party event. This was probably the tastiest and healthiest fried chicken I’ve ever had!
I didn’t really have anything pirate themed so had a last minute idea to bring Mike Wazowski with me and stick an eye patch on him.
It was nice to have a chat and a drink with everyone, and we also met an African Grey dancing to an accordion.
The conference and talks
As always, Codegarden was insightful and amazing, with interesting talks and activities. It turns out, there was also a purpose behind the floppy disk badges. Sebastian from Umbraco (Sebastiaan Janssen | LinkedIn) set up a scavenger hunt with various terminals hidden around the venue. The task was to find all the terminals and insert our floppy disk into the terminal to record our visits. At the end of the activity we could claim a free pair of Umbraco socks!
Some notable talks from my perspective were:
You Shall Not Password: Modern Authentication for Web Apps – this talk summarises the different types of authentication methods out there and provides a general overview of the strengths and weaknesses of different methods.
Intentionally building community through ritual – Jason always delivers on their talks. We got into the nitty gritty of what makes a ritual and how it has defined our friendly Umbraco community. Could we form useful rituals in the workplace to foster co-operation and support among fellow colleagues?
Is ChatGPT killing the penguins? And other AI considerations – AI is a hot topic in this day and age. In this talk we had a live demo of running an LLM locally and how much power it draws. It also questioned how we should use AI to save the penguins, such as using the relevant models for the task at hand.
From Clicks to Commands: AI for Editors, Developers, and Everyone Else – this was no.1 talk for me. It was inspiring and impressive to see what AI could do in terms of interacting with Umbraco directly. We saw a few video demos of what Phil and Matt accomplished with the Cursor IDE to bend Umbraco to their will. I have downloaded Cursor myself and have already made a lot of progress with a few open source projects I have been wanting to work on. For me, it's demonstrating how accessible coding can be with AI to bring great ideas to life.
From Hot Metal to HTML: The Story of Type – to end the event we had Dylan deliver a talk on types/fonts. We went back in time to the beginning when humankind expressed themselves through symbols and how that has shaped the future of text/icons on computer screens to signage.
The infamous Codegarden dinner
Like every Codegarden, the memorable event is the dinner where the weird, wacky and wonderful part of the community is expressed. Removable tattoos were part of the theme this year and of course I stuck one on my forehead (it washed off, so no problems with passport control!)
Umbraco may have broken the world record for the largest musical chairs event, however, I am glad I didn’t win as it was a giant cheese wheel.
The bingo prizes were also, in my opinion, worth playing for - except for the caravan. Luckily the winner of the Caravan lives in Denmark! The other prizes was a small Umbraco themed crypto coin and a giant wedding cake which made its rounds around the tables. In my opinion, the cake was tastier than the dessert provided by the venue.
The aftermath of the cake and for some reason lots of energy drinks that I don’t think anyone drank!
To end the Codegarden dinner event, we had small fire pits placed outside where friendly chats occurred and marshmallows were roasted.
To finish this post, it's confirmed that CG26 will be held in Copenhagen. There are way more weird and wonderful things that occurred - this is just a glimpse of what happens at Codegarden. I look forward to seeing my fellow Umbracians there next year! Take care!
