Codegarden 2025 & MVP Summit
25th June, 2025
Some thoughts, and loads of pictures, from the 20th Umbraco Codegarden Conference and the first ever MVP Summit!
This year, Codegarden celebrates its 20th anniversary, 20 years of friendly conversations, learning, high-fives, unicorns, bingo, flipping cars and rabbits!
I honestly can't believe it's been a whole year since the last Codegarden (read my 2024 recap), it feels like it was just yesterday! But alas, here we are in 2025, I've written a bit about what happened and uploaded a few too many photos.
My Codegarden trip started with two nights in Copenhagen. I touched down on Friday and stayed at this really cool hostel called Next Hostel. On Saturday, I went on a walking tour (which I highly recommend), then a pub crawl with a bunch of awesome people I met at the hostel!
Then on Sunday morning, I dragged my hungover self to the station to catch the train to Odense!
On the train, I tested the latest alpha release of the Contentment package for Umbraco 16. I also attempting to create my first Bellissima extension using Lotte's opinionated package starter template.
After arriving at my hotel, I headed to the nearest shop to grab some water and some hangover food! I had a quick nap, and in the evening I headed over to Storms Pakhus to meet up with some Umbraco peeps for food and some drinks!
🗓️ Monday - MVP Summit Day 1 🏆
Monday was time for the first-ever Umbraco MVP Summit, and the day kicked off with a brilliant talk by Matt Brailsford titled "How to Create a Neurodivergent Friendly Workplace", which was an incredibly insightful talk on how we can all make our workplaces better for everyone.
The summit was organised and planned brilliantly; the content of the schedule was curated by the MVPs over the weeks leading up to it, we all added discussion topics to a big spreadsheet, then voted on these topics, and the top-voted ones were then included in the schedule of the summit.
We discussed loads of great topics from the new backoffice, documentation, meetups, community growth & engagement, training and AI! The summit was split into two tracks, and the discussions were done in an open circle format with one person designated as the note taker.
The food was amazing, and the rooftop drinks evening was great fun! The day went by wayyyy too quickly.
I am super honoured and humbled to have been awarded the Umbraco MVP award for the fifth time.
Photo by Umbraco
Photo by Umbraco
Photo by Markus Johansson
Photo by Umbraco
Photo by Umbraco
Photo by Umbraco
🗓️ Tuesday - MVP Summit Day 2, Workshops and Pre-Party! 🏆🛠️🏴☠️🍻
Tuesday kicked off with day 2 of the MVP summit. This was a shorter day, with a hackathon and a recap by the note takers on all of the things we discussed yesterday.
In the afternoon, I attended the "Web Hacking 101" workshop by Steven Harland at Umbraco HQ, which was brilliant; I had never done anything like this before, so it was super interesting learning how to use tools like Burp Suite, sublist3r and nuclei to test and exploit a demo website.
Photo by Umbraco
Photo by Umbraco
Photo by Umbraco
Photo by Umbraco
Photo by Umbraco
Photo by Umbraco
Afterwards, I met up with my colleagues Lili Rossiter and James Keegan for food and drinks at Storms, before heading to the pirate-themed pre-party at Umbraco HQ! It was my colleague's first time at Codegarden, so it was really awesome showing them around and filling them in on all the Codegarden slang and lore!
🗓️ Wednesday - Codegarden Day 1 🦄
And now it was time for day 1 of the 20th Codegarden! As usual, we were greeted by many smiles, hugs, high fives, live music and even a real-totally-not-a-horse-live Unicorn!!!
Some of the highlights of the morning included the keynote, the announcement of Umbraco Compose (which looks really interesting! I can already think of a few usecases for my clients) and the MVP announcements
I'm super excited and honoured to have my Umbraco MVP status renewed for the 5th time! A huge congratulations and H5YR to all of the other renewed and new Umbraco MVPs! Incredibly well deserved, every single one!
Also, shout-out to the line break, really made me stretch to point to my name! 😂
Throughout the week, I had been wondering what was on our Floppy Disk lanyards? And it turns out, there was a secret scavenger hunt! We had to register our floppy disks at the Dev Rel Den, and then hunt for 5 other laptops, that where hidden around the venue; and the first 50 people who found them all on the Thursday would win a pair of Umbraco socks! What a freaking awesome idea!!
This year, there was a Swag Customisation area, where you could iron on various Umbraco swag logos! So me and my colleague decided to pimp our Friendly hats! This was honestly such a cool idea, a massive #H5YR to whoever at HQ came up with this idea!
Naturally, as it's Codegarden, I also played a lot of good 'ol Hammerschlagen!
I spent most of the first day in the "corridor track" just meeting and talking to the awesome people of the Umbraco community! It was great seeing old friends and many new ones too! And honestly, I think this social aspect of Codegarden is the best part of Codegarden!
But the two talks that I attended on the first day were:
- "Friendly by Design" - Erica Quessenberry
- "The Sandia Effect - when Platinum and Gold combine to elevate the future for a billion dollar brand" - Jen Bradshaw & Martin Hoyle
These talks where brilliant, Erica's talk tackled the important topic of privilage, and how having an awareness of our own privilage can help shape the work we do and how we can use that awareness to foster and increase the inclusivity the community; Jen and Martin's talk was a very inspirational talk about how two seperate agencies came together to deliver a very impressive solution for a joint client! This was a nice reminder of how friendly the Umbraco community is, seeing as how two seperate agencies could happily and effectively work together.
More Wednesday pics:
🗓️ Thursday - Codegarden Day 2 🦄
Day two consisted of a lot more talks for me; there seemed to be more "technical" talks on day 2, which I thought was a nice way to split the two days.
- "Intentionally building community through ritual" - Jason Wodicka
- "Advanced Search 101" - Callum Whyte
- "The Future of (Umbraco) Search" - Kenn Jacobsen
- "Revamping the media section (Making the dream a reality)" - Steve Temple
- "Effective Load Testing With JMeter" - Joe Kepley
- "Umbracoffee LIVE" - Callum Whyte & Marcin Zajkowski
I attended the above talks. I won't write about them all, but they were all really, really good! I'm super excited about the upcoming search changes and how I can leverage that with my Azure AI Search work!
Also, this year they brought back the boat rides! I had heard stories about the boat rides of the past and was super excited to see that they had returned this year!
Free beer, snacks and pirate-themed! What more could you want?? Arrrr!
The second half of the scavenger hunt also began in the morning, and my colleagues and I hunted around, found them all and won some socks!
Then came the famous dinner and bingo evening! And it was just as awesome as always! We had delicious food, temporary tattoos, and DirkJan Ranzijn played soundtracked the night.
Also, we MVPs had been given prior instructions (including an instructional video) to dance the Macarena every time it came on, and boy, did we dance!
Halfway through dinner, we also played musical chairs, which was pure chaos, and the winner won an absolutely massive wheel of cheese! I'd hate to think how much their airline charged them for overweight luggage haha! And Slave & Eagle returned for one last performance!
You can find more videos on my YouTube playlist here: YouTube Playlist: Umbraco Codegarden 2025 - Owain Jones
I also recommend checking out Paul Seal's playlist of videos: YouTube Playlist: Codegarden 25 - Paul Seal
The party continued into the night, with fires and marshmallows, hammerschlagen and dancing!
🗓️ Friday - Codegarden Day 3 🦄💻🚶
Somehow, I didn't have a hangover on the Friday morning, but it was still tough getting up early!
The day started with a brilliant talk by David Whitney about open-source exploitation, then I returned to the swag customisation area and pimped my boring backpack! I then joined the hackathon and continued creating my first extension in the new Bellissima backoffice using Lotte's opinionated package starter template. I got it working with the classic "Hello World" and set up SignalR (which was a tad different to how it was done in v13, but the docs were up to date and easy to follow!).
After the hackathon, I met up with Dean Leigh, headed to Storms for some food, and then we both joined the "Discover Odense: Walk in Hans Christian Andersen's Footsteps" walking tour!
And that was it, Codegarden 2025 completed! It was an amazing, awesome, brilliant week; the Umbraco community is honestly such an amazing, friendly and welcoming community, there's nothing else quite like it!
Well, now I guess it's time to start looking forward to next year's Codegarden!
