Who are you and why is Umbraco and CodeGarden relevant to you?

I am Adam Southorn, Technical Director at Jabberwokie, a digital agency based in London. I have recently been attempting to move our big clients off enterprise systems, in favour of Umbraco. Umbraco has been a core part of my development process for over 2 years now, and having extensive experience in most widely-used CMS's, I have found the improvements made to the Umbraco core in the last few years very promising and have no hesitation recommending it to all our clients/potential clients.

To fully understand Umbraco, I felt I needed to visit CodeGarden and experience the community in person. The other systems I use give the impression of faceless organisations, but Umbraco looked more like a family. I can fully understand why now, as everyone at the conference shared the same enthusiam for the project, from Niels down to the freelance developers from all over the world. Everyone wanted to not just use Umbraco as a product, but to contribute ideas and share their knowledge and experiences. It was my first CodeGarden but I have already bought my ticket for next year.

Which session(s)/workshop/event(s) did you got the most out, enjoyed the most?

I enjoyed the Angular.js workshop the most. Being able to learn from the people who created Umbraco and work alongside some of the most experienced developers inspired me improve on my current knowledge, and work towards creating something special. I took home with me the idea of not being bound to create what I am limited by, but to create my own boundaries and create whatever I want within them.

I found all of the sessions I went to useful in their own ways. Each was very different in concept, but they were all based on the same idea of sharing ideas and knowledge on using Umbraco. The work that Chris Gaskell produced on supercharging Umbraco extremely useful and insightful.

Anything else that you wish to add/share?

Just a general thanks to everyone at Umbraco if this can be passed on, despite all the humour and madness of the days there (and the beers), I can see how much you guys put into this product and this community. It speaks volumes that I came expecting to learn a lot from people like Niels and Per, but I ended up learning so much more from all sorts of people from around the world, and that's how you know it's truly a community.