If someone offered you the opportunity to spend a weekend in The Cattle Shed in the middle of the Peak District with 20+ other Umbraco developers / advocates, how would you respond?

Don’t be fooled by the name of the venue, this was a fantastically presented living space and accommodation, all with the picturesque Derbyshire hills as a back-drop.

If you’re like me, you would have some apprehension about taking part, but that would soon fade when you meet people of the Umbraco community.

Day 0 - Friday

For me the journey started in Edinburgh, making my way to Manchester Piccadilly by train. Given the bad press the British rail network typically receives, this was actually a non-eventful journey.

For the attendees I had met on my journey from Manchester to Grindleford, striking up a conversation was easy and flowed, a sign of a good weekend ahead.

Upon arrival at the venue you’re introduced with a physical H5YR (if you’re not familiar with the term, the Umbraco community is all about High 5, You Rock).

Each evening was an opportunity to grab a drink and relax, socialising with attendees or taking part in the various activities; be it playing board-games (including a one-of-a-kind CODECABIN Guess-Who?), Mario Kart or an Umbraco-themed guessing game on the Saturday (which our team, Nice Package, won).

The entire weekend was fuelled by the wonderful cooking of Head Chef, Lucy, who prepared a lovely lamb curry for our first meal of the weekend.

Day 1 - Saturday

To kick-start the weekend some of the attendees (not me) went on an early morning run before diving into a great continental breakfast spread.

One of the organisers introduced us to another phrase paramount to the success of the weekend:

Always. Be. Trello-ing.

The weekend was split into one day dedicated to discussions / talks and the second day more of hackathon / technical sessions.

As a self-proclaimed “unconference” these sessions were lead by attendees, with everyone suggesting a topic to discuss or work on over the weekend in a shared Trello board, with attendees joining a card to show their interest.

This backlog was then ordered by most-to-least subscribed setting the agenda for the CODECABIN weekend.

Here’s a run down of the topics covered during the Saturday and a few key-takeaways:

• Neurodivergence Strategies for Work, Life and Everything

  • Attendees opened up about their own experience with being neurodivergent in the workplace or how they’d received a diagnoses much later in their career.
  • Some useful suggestions raised during the discussion:
    • Writing a Personal Manual to share with your manager and team to understand how best to engage and collaborate with you in the workplace.
    • Ensure that there’s always agendas for meetings, to keep the conversation on track and allow attendees to prepare contributions.
    • Turn off notifications and distractions if you can, especially Teams or Slack messages during focus time.
    • Ensure that deadlines and priorities are understood by both parties.

• Best Practice for Building Package Projects in a V13 and V14 World

  • Since the Umbraco backoffice UI has gone through a major refresh, packages need to be rewritten to target V14.
  • Where to find documentation and good examples of approaches.

• Everything You Wanted to Know About Performance

  • Conversation walking through the best approaches to optimise performance, from reducing CPU workload to how you architect your solution.

• Backoffice Experiences That Make a Difference

  • Discussions on how to improve the content editor experience, useful packages or nice to have that improve the user experience.

• Umbraco Flavoured Markdown (UFM)

  • We walked through what UFM is, how it replaces AngularJS label templates in the backoffice and how you can extend it with custom components or filters.

• Large and Complex Sites with Headless

  • Discussions on how to build complex sites with Umbraco headlessly using Static Site Generation (SSG) and Server Side Rendering (SSR) approaches where appropriate.

• Commerce, Cloud and Nuxt

  • Walked us through the new Commerce Storefront API and how to mix it with Content Delivery API to build a headless commerce store.

• Comparing Stacks

  • Discussion on how best to structure projects, leaning into how base builds and standard packages reduce set up time. Battle between UI utility libraries and CSS preprocessors.

With a broad range of experiences and perspectives, and the breadth and depth of topics and discussions the weekend had me fully engaged.

Being able to hear from people working within Umbraco HQ and developers ahead of the curve on V14 adoption gave me some great insight into the direction Umbraco is headed.

All of this topped off with a visit from the Pizza Post, a pizza food truck.

Day 2 - Sunday

The Sunday was an opportunity to get some hands-on-keyboard development time, building something and collaborating with other attendees.

My contribution on the Sunday was inspired by a package idea I had for a while and was reignited during one of the discussions on better backoffice experiences.

I built a package to allow automatic organisation of the content and media tree within Umbraco, with the ability for it to be extended through writing custom organiser logic as a developer sees fit.

You can checkout the code for the package on GitHub.

At the end of our hacking; we presented our work, gaining feedback and moving our card into the Achievement Unlocked column on the Trello board.

A Sunday would be incomplete without a traditional Sunday Roast, topping off the weekend.

Rounding-up

Hopefully, the CODECABIN team can rally again for 2025 but I can appreciate the amount of effort that Lucy, Matt, Lotte and Lee (also can’t forget Karl) put in can be a lot to take on. Huge H5YR to each of them, without them there would be no CODECABIN.

Also thanks to all of the attendees for making me feel welcome and for your contribution throughout the weekend: Clive, Eric, Erica, Grey, Jack, Jason, Jen, Jesper, Joe G, Joe K, Luke H, Markus, Nora, Richard, Sarah, Sean, Shelly and (my room-mate) Yari.

I would highly recommend anyone like myself with a passion for Umbraco and a willingness to learn and share, to apply for the opportunity to attend next year.