Goodmorning and Welcome to Codegarden
Opening of the annual Umbraco conference - Codegarden in Odense.
It's gonna be a long day if we never stop talking, isn't that great? Alright, we've just got a couple of things to cover, and then we'll move right on to the keynote. So the important things to know about the toilets over there, and this is the main room, as you might have guessed. The other sessions are in the entrance room, so as you came in, just to the left, that's the entrance room. And to get to the back room, it's halfway to the entrance room, on the side, same side. But you sort of go out the big door and then in the small door. You'll find your way, there'll be people going, just, you know, it'll be great. And then in this afternoon for the workshops, there'll be someone to sort of lead you through the maze to find the room. So that'll be fine. The Wi-Fi is supposed to be good, and it just might be. But do avoid, you know, remote desktoping and backups and things like that. Think of everyone else. So the Wi-Fi is doc5000guest, and the password is 50005000. And we have only one last thing to do, and that's to commemorate our moments together. So if you just look your prettiest. Which is not difficult for you. All right. And level five good morning on the count of, just keep it up there. And don't move. There it is. Oh, you're the best. Awesome. Thank you so much. Have a fantastic festival. And please welcome Neil Sarkvig, the chief unicorn. Bye-bye. Woo-hoo. Ah, good morning. This is awesome. Thank you so much for coming. It is our 11th Code Garden. And for the first many Code Gardens, we were hacking all night the day before to get a release ready. Then we matured and thought, we will never do that again. And we haven't. Until this year. We forgot that we had a new type of release. And we've changed the venue. This is the first time we're in Unze. We've been five years in a row at the old venue. And it was business as usual. It was boring. We weren't afraid anymore. This time, it hasn't been boring. And unfortunately, there's been a lot of people in the team that has been hacking this venue to make it ready. So please give them a big round of applause. Anyway, let's get on with it. We've got a lot of things to cover. We're going to be a little bit delayed. But it's good news, so who cares. We've got a little agenda for this keynote. It's going to be about... Oops. Too fast. It's going to be a little bit about growing. Then a lot about the Umbrago CMS. And a lot about the service. So that's sort of the three main topics for today. But as always, how can you talk about growing without having numbers? And if only you had installed just a little bit more this morning. If we hadn't had CodeGarden, we would have rounded the magic number. But who cares? It's big. Right now, there's more than 360,000 Umbrago sites running live. That's amazing. This number is from an hour ago. It might have just reached 361,000. It's fantastic. Thank you. Another great number is the number of active people in the community. It's more than 200,000. This is a 25% increase from last year. It's insane. So thank you very much. We define active community people by people who have more than 25 sessions on our Umbrago. If we counted anyone that's active on ours throughout the year, it would be 1.1 million people. It's crazy. It would be the largest city in Denmark. So that's quite some perspective. Another fantastic number is the number of installs. For many years, we've been very close, just about a thousand installs a day. This year, we are now at more than 1100 installs every single day of Umbrago. It's amazing. It's just... Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. is how it looks like at our office. We have a dashboard. We can't tell who people are anymore. This is just one day and there's just dots going on all the time. It's fantastic. So the topic for this keynote, we're going to talk a little bit about change because there's a lot of change coming over the next 12 months. Of course, there's also a lot. Business as usual, don't be afraid. But there is a lot of awesome things coming both to the CMS and to Progressive Service. But some things doesn't change, just a little bit. And that's, of course, our roots, which comes from our community and at the heart of our community is our MVPs. The last many years, we've nominated five MVPs every single year or announced five MVPs every single year. But ever since we started doing that, the community has more than 20 doubled in size. It makes no sense to only have five MVPs. It's so hard. It's so hard to select them. So this year, we've decided to have four types of MVPs. They are all MVPs, but in four different categories. And I'm going to announce them as a group and then they're going to come up here and then you're going to make an insane amount of noise because these are the best. Okay? Deal? Deal. Okay. Deal. That's the way to do it. So for the amazing community people, please give a massive round of applause to Erica, Kyle, Lottie, Ravi, and Janie. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And stay up here and have a party in the... Call category. We got Andy, we got Bjarne, and we got Lars-Erik for incredible contributions to the call. Thank you. In the full envelope, our category, please give a lot of noise to Dave, Jeven, Mark, and Dennis. Thank you. Hey, Dave. And finally, for packages, give it up for Kevin, for Matt, and for Lee. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. The 2015-2016 MVPs, give them a huge round of applause. You're the best. Thank you. Thanks a lot. So now we're going to move on a little bit, and we're going to talk a little bit about this growing thing. Because it's fantastic to see these numbers. As I mentioned, more than 1,100 downloads. The first six months of Umbago, there was 1,000 downloads. So it's come a long way. But when you grow, some things get more difficult. Remember, this wasn't supposed to happen. There's never been a plan. It was just a little bit fun. It was just one project on the side, okay? And then it turned into this madness. And a couple of years ago, Peer and I was like, this is actually getting quite difficult. There's a lot of demands, and it's a very competitive industry. So we decided to get some help from some experienced people that had actually tried to grow companies before. So we kind of matured. We got another chairman. He refuses to be a chairman, but we got a cupbearer, a very experienced guy from Worcester, one of the biggest SaaS companies in Europe. And we're also growing on other levels in the company to make sure that we can keep growing the company. But what's very important then when you grow... Oh, by the way, this is insane. I forgot about this. This is... So we did a survey recently at AWA. Maybe some of you noticed the very annoying animated gif to try to convince you to do the survey. And based on that, we found the median cost, or project size for an embargo project. And based on that, there's more than 3 billion euros, I can't say that big numbers, a year being done in embargo. And when you look at traditional software vendors, the ratio between the vendor and the partners in terms of revenue is about 1 to 8. Now, everybody's talking about sharing economy, and it's bullshit, right? But in a way, it's not. In embargo, we have true sharing company because the ratio between the vendor and the ecosystem is 1 to 1,600. I think that's very nice, and I kind of love that's how it goes. So it's kind of a very sustainable project. But in order for us to keep growing and to make sure that we know what's going on, to make sure that we don't forget our roots, we started to sort of actually discuss what is the mission of this project, what is our vision for the company, etc. And we actually formalized all these things. It sounds kind of corporate, but it's actually quite cool. And our mission is to help you deliver delightful digital experiences by making embargo friendly, simpler, and social. And the point with this is that just like our community, just like our software, everything around it should be friendly. The stuff we do is beautiful because embargo doesn't prevent you from doing any type of projects. And at the same time, we don't claim that we're the simplest tool out there, but every single day, we strive to make embargo simpler. We're one of the few CMSs that still insist on being a CMS. And what we do is doesn't bloat the tool with new features, but actually try to simplify what's there already. And finally, the social part. We want to get together. We want to have amazing meetups. We want to, just like we did yesterday, open up our office. You're always welcome to come by. And finally, we create software in terms of embargo as a service that help you collaborate. On your projects. Now, our vision is crazy, but this is actually, if we don't reach this, we have to stop our growth. Stop the ratio of how we grow. We believe in five years, there will be at least a million embargo sites running, and 10% of them will be on the service. Now, mind you that the ratio, again, is one to 10. Sometimes I've heard, you know, we talk a lot about the service because we think it's fantastic, and then sometimes I've heard people say, oh, but embargo is so commercial. My point is, we've always been commercial. That's why we've been so successful. That's why we got lots of people full-time working on the core, and that's why it's so good. You're also making a lot of money, as I just mentioned. You're all here, more or less, because you actually get your salary because you do embargo-related things. So it's not commercial. But just because we're commercial doesn't mean we don't do open source. Again, nine out of 10 installations in 2021 will be open source, will be running on the open source. At the heart of embargo service is the open source CMS, and that's never going to change. We'll always be open source, and we'll always be MIT. And finally, to make sure that we sort of stand by these values, these things, we got five values, both for the company and for the project. Again, we are friendly, as I mentioned. We're also hungry. We are hungry. We made some fantastic software. And until recently, we've been very low-key about telling people. We're going to do something about that. We really want to make sure that more people get to know about Umbraco. We trust. So we trust in each other as colleagues, but we also trust in the community. So whenever you give us feedback, we actually trust that it's with the best intentions. When you do pull requests, when you make packages, et cetera, we trust, but of course, we review whatever's going on. Then we're respectful. Umbraco is a global community. There's people today from more than 30 countries, any type of culture. And we should embrace the diversity we have in the community and we should strive to make it even better than it is now. And then finally, of course, we're going to be open, or we are going to be, we are open. At the very heart, we're open source. Our bug tracker is open. Our roadmap is open, et cetera. So very important. And this might sound a little bit boring, but to make sure that you have a background of how we operate, as a company, as we move on. Now I'm going to talk a little bit about, not a little bit, I'm actually going to talk a lot about the CMS. For those who've been to the UK festival, you might have heard us talk a lot about this idea of refinement versus exploration. It's two different ways, roughly spoken, to do product development. The idea of refinement is that you get this good idea and then you just finish it. One good idea and you're convinced that it's awesome. One good idea could be V5. We don't want to try that again. The other thing is exploration. You make prototypes, you make experiments, and all of the sudden you realize, whoa, that one, that was good. And from there you refine. Okay? And what's so beautiful about this is that we've been more and more conscious about how awesome this is in our community. Because if there's one place that's, that there's a lot of exploration going on, it's actually when you do websites. And some of the projects that you do turns out into packages. And from there it goes into the core. So it's a fantastic way that this model, which is coined by Bill Buxton, by the way, I'm not that bright, has been made. We also do this internally. So when we released 7.4 earlier this year, it was the result of six months, of exploration first. So we had lots of prototypes. We invited people to the HQ to test. We did that several times. And once we got it, felt we got it right, we started refining. We thought we would refine for a month. We refined for another half a year. But it also, it paid off. 7.4 is by far the fastest adopted release of Umbraco ever. Came out in February and there's more than 80,000, and we've been working on the installs of it ever since. So we think it's a really, really good model. And what's so beautiful, as I mentioned, is the way the community also explore here. We've been trying at the HQ for ages to find, come up with a good way to do repeatable content. But in the community, you've come up with many, much better ideas, like archetype or nested content. And these are the things that gets refined and then can make it into the core eventually. So I'm really, really happy that nested content that was funded by Umbrella and made by Lee and Matt will go in the core from 7.6. Yep. Another area we've seen a lot of exploration is around health checking. So once you put your site live, how do you actually... I'm going out of battery. Once you know that your site is... that your site is live, how do you make sure that it's actually in a healthy state? The community has been doing a lot of experimentation about that. Started from a package by Matt called You Go Live several years ago. And then the last year, that has been refined a lot as well. The same with content redirects, etc. So the best exploration happens in packages, which makes you wonder, why do the package section in the core suck so much? Have you ever tried finding packages from within Umbrago? We actually had an app store before it was a thing. Think about that. We announced the package repository back in 2006. But it almost hasn't gotten any love ever since. Have you ever tried installing a local package? It almost tried to tell you, you shouldn't do this. Not only does the UI say, don't, it's dangerous, it's also so ugly that you don't want to see that screen. So we thought it's time to do something about that package section. And we've done so in 7.5.