The Cogworks to Host the Fifth Annual Umbraco UK Festival
No matter what your business is, having a beautifully designed website will be essential to achieve success. One of the most important components to your web strategy is your Content Management System (CMS). There are many great CMS tools out there, but Umbraco is by far the largest open source .NET tool used by large and small companies alike. The Cogworks is a leading Umbraco Gold Partner and user experience specialist that hosts the annual Umbraco UK Festival, which draws developers from all over the world for two days of agile hacking, distinguished speakers, and caffeine fueled workshops at the spooky but awesome location - the Crypt on the Green on October 29-30th. Anthony Dang from The Cogworks gives readers a sneak peak to the festival this year.
How has the Umbraco festival changed since 2011?
It started with just a handful of people when Cogworks was just starting to grow the Umbraco community. This year, we have sold 250 tickets, 40-50 people are on the waiting list, and we are waiting to release another batch soon so it might get up to 300 attendants. This is big considering the main festival that happens in Copenhagen every year (CodeGarden) is only 400 people.
What differentiates Umbraco from other CMS'?
First of all, Umbraco is free and open source so anyone can use it. The fact that it's open source means that anyone who knows how, can open the source code and and contribute any fixes. They are able to extend Umbraco any way that they want so it is completely customizable. Umbraco is super easy, intuitive, and free. There are other products out there that are nice but super expensive. If you are a .NET developer, it's great because it's like a playground where you can do anything. If you are a front end developer, you don't have to know anything on the backend, you can just use Umbraco as you would a normal CMS.
Relating to the fact that Umbraco is open source, can you tell me more about the hackathon the day before the main event?
We have only ran the hackathon three times. The first time we ran it, we had 18 people. Last year we had 35 people and hopefully this year we will get a lot more. Basically the hackathon is a bug fixing day where we take all the trivial bugs in Umbraco that you can fix in under an hour. These can be from a typo to pixels of padding for a text box that may not align correctly or maybe something more complicated or quirky in functionality. We run these hacks in one hour sprints where people pick tasks that they are pretty sure that they can fix in that timeframe. They pair up with one or two other people and they tackle the task together. Last year, we had 35 bugs fixed. Hopefully this year we will get more. The Umbraco core team will be there and hopefully we can get up to 40 people at this year's hackathon.
Do the participants get to choose what bugs they want to fix beforehand?
Yes, absolutely. There is a list of bugs on issue tracker. Everyone just shows up and checks what they want to do. It's almost like a competition where people read through the bug list and whoever writes down the bug ID number and gets it on the board, gets to work on that bug.
Do you think the success of the Umbraco UK Festival is due to the general growth in the Umbraco community or how the festival is run?
I definitely think it's both. For one thing, we don't just do this event. We do a Meetup every month and that has been running for years. I came to England in 2010 and there was already an Umbraco meetup at that point. We have been growing the community and we have been running workshops through the year. We tend to run 2-3 other learning events apart from the festival. There are plenty of developers who already know Umbraco but there are plenty more who don't.
Can you give us a teaser of what's on for this year's festival?
The venue this year is a church with an underground crypt. The venue is ridiculously awesome. There is also a ridiculous amount of speakers this year. We actually had so many speaker applications this year that we had to shrink the size of speaking time and extend the day by almost an hour so we can fit more speakers in. This year for the first time, we are also running workshops. So we have two streams of presentations in parallel with two streams of workshops. People come here for knowledge but it is also a social event. If people come to see a speaker, they will be at the talk and we try to mix up the talks. For example, If you are a backend developer, we try to cater to your interests by not putting two backend talks at the same time and vice versa for front end.
What are the top three essentials to run a successful tech conference?
Coffee. One year, we didn't have coffee during one of the coffee breaks and all hell broke lose. It was like World World Z. There was a mass exodus. To run a tech conference, you need free flowing coffee all day from the morning to the afternoon, no exception - and it needs to be unlimited. The other thing is good speakers with good topics. Even though it is very much a social event, people are there to learn as well so you have to have enticing topics for people. Otherwise, they might just come and hang out in the lobby. As a part of that, we have also added the workshop from the feedback we received from people who came to previous festivals. It comes down to the quality of the content at the conference. The third essential is a really good venue in a good location. A good conference needs to be fun and exciting which is why we choose a church with an underground crypt. Because the venue is centrally located, there are also many places nearby to go after the festival.
Photo Credit: Douglas Robar Percipient Studios