Issues

Dying to attend my first Codegarden

This is a story about how Communities, Conferences and a certain Content Management System have had such a positive influence on my work life and my personal life. 

It’s also a story about physical and mental health, why you should never take them for granted and make the most of every opportunity presented to you whilst you can. 

I love attending tech conference… but it wasn’t always that way. Not so much ‘imposter syndrome’, more like ‘peer fear’.

I’m a web designer specialising in CMS Template Systems, Component Libraries and User / Editor Experience since 1996. 

I had been engaging with the web community online since 2010, but had been in this industry for 18 years before plucking up the courage to go to a tech conference in person.

My first experience as a web designer

1996

I was having a sleepless night worrying that our first child was now overdue and that I had an interview for a web designer internship with an internet service provider the next morning.  

At 1:30 a.m. my partner said "get me to the hospital, now!"

Six hours later, after some complications, our first son was born.  

I found it hard to leave my partner and newborn baby at the hospital but at 9:30 a.m. I arrived for my interview to learn how to build web sites.  

I was accepted for the role, and I was given a pile of books, a brief, an FTP login and sent off home to start work on a live web site.  

During my one year internship I completed: 

  • a Graphics Design course at City and Islington College where I learned design principles including layout, colour and typography that I still use to this day.  
  • NVQ Levels 2 and 3 in Web Technologies where I learned to set up a web server and create my first CMS using an Access Database and Classic ASP. 

I was a Web Designer! 

My first experience as a freelancer

1997

I was very lucky, immediately after my internship and qualifications I got my first freelance role in the City of London. I was working for clients such as Shell, Microsoft, UBS, Intel, Royal Bank of Scotland, AXA Insurance, Liverpool Victoria etc… 

However, I found I was being given websites designed by graphic designers, user experience design for web had not really established itself yet. 

So I focused on contracts with Brand and Identity Agencies where I was able to build Web Design Systems and Component Libraries as well as complete websites. 

I gained an incredible amount of knowledge and experience in the role of Technical Director working alongside some of the best Creative Directors in the Brand and Identity industry. 

Building our first production CMS

2nd April 2001

I have always been a keen cyclist and cycle campaigner and as such had built a static website for The London Cycling Campaign in Microsoft FrontPage. Eventually they needed online membership, then a rides database, which were built with fellow cyclist and volunteer Ault Nathanielsz, in classic ASP. 

This increased their membership and sign up for rides considerably and in 2003 the site evolved into a full-blown CMS. 

Umbraco version 1.0 was announced made in a combo of classic ASP, COM  objects written in VB.NET and .NET webservices written in C#.

Before we knew it we had clients lining up to use our CMS including; Transport 2000, RoadPeace, The Fawcett Society and the first Bird Flu website for World Health Organisation. 

Starting our first web agency

13th June 2005

Our little CMS really took off, we were fully booked a year ahead, so we decided to give it a name and set up a Limited company to make accounting easier.  

Wholething was incorporated on 13 June 2005 and Wholething CMS is used to build several prestigious sites.  

Umbraco 2.0 is released on February 16th 2005 as an open source CMS. This is the official birthday of the open source version of Umbraco.

Attending my first conference

24th January 2014

It was “Milton Keynes Geek Night all Dayer”, an eclectic mix of individuals from all disciplines of the digital and creative industry. 

I had engaged with many of the speakers and attendees online for several years and some of them had encouraged me to attend and I was really glad they did. 

The experience for me was amazing. 

The talks themselves were exactly as I expected, having watched many of the speakers online previously. 

What I had not anticipated was the community atmosphere and the sense of belonging to a group of people that get it, that get me. 

Of course, not everyone was a web designer there were copywriters, graphic designers, backend developers, SEO and marketeers, Project Managers but we all had so much experience in common. 

I made a lot of new friends that day, most of whom I am still in touch with now.  

Then there was the post event buzz, something I had not experienced before, I felt refreshed, thoroughly motivated and ready to go back to work with a new perspective on the industry. 

Attending my first Umbraco talk

1st May 2014

James Young – Off Road Code / Cutting Edge Knives speaking at DotYork 2014 about Umbraco

James Young – Off Road Code / Cutting Edge Knives speaking at DotYork 2014 about Umbraco

With my newfound enthusiasm for tech conferences, I began to keep an eye on upcoming events. 

For several years I had been using Microsoft’s Webmatrix to install and test various CMSs such as Orchard, DotNetNuke and of course Umbraco.  

I really liked Umbraco, the version I tried was 4.6 (as we know it had its ups and down in subsequent versions) and some of the original video tutorials from Umbraco TV are still online:  

https://youtu.be/hNVEWtELODM?si=v8zmbk-eAeykPPoR 

https://youtu.be/wEeC4Bd-QZg?si=3GZQpANKigk87A6A 

So, I was quite excited when I spotted that an Umbraco front-ender named James Young from Offroadcode was doing a talk at DotYork 2014. 

It was called “The things you learn when you’re the client” about how they had designed and built the Cutting Edge Knives website in Umbraco. 

The whole conference was amazing, so much so I went again the following year and so was James’s talk. 

I got to chat with James after his talk and he gave Umbraco a glowing review, enough to get me to give it another try. 

Running my first meetup

12th February 2015

I had been enjoying attending Colchester Digital, Colchester’s only tech meetup, for a while but the organisers had run out of energy to run it and were asking for volunteers to take over. 

One of the things I wanted was for Colchester to have its own annual conference, in the hope of making that happen I volunteered with co-organisers Anna Bravington and Ric Harvey. Little did I know it would take a lot of hard work and four years before a conference happened. 

We held our first event at a fantastic new venue at Essex University’s iLab where I met Matt Chick (pictured hands-on hip) by chance an Umbraco developer! 

We began a new format of two speakers on a common theme and it was immediately successful. It meant we had lots of new attendees at each event covering the breadth and depth of the digital industry. 

The group grew to 800 members with an attendance of 20-30 each event. After a few months Anna and Ric had to step down and Matt stepped up and we moved to Colchester Institute. 

My first experience with diverticulitis

6th November 2015

In November I started to suffer from severe pain in my lower abdomen. After a series of tests over the next 18 months Bowel Cancer was ruled out and in 2017 I was diagnosed with Diverticulosis. 

About half of all people in the UK have diverticula by the time they are 50 years old.

I was advised by the doctors that there is a very small chance that one day my bowel could rupture but with exercise and a good diet the risk can be greatly reduced. 

I made a conscious decision to completely change my lifestyle and increased my and in general look after my health and well-being a lot better than I had. 

And it worked I stopped suffering diverticulitis attacks and most of my life return to normal. 

Our first Umbraco websites

12th January 2018

With the help of Uskinned we finally bit the bullet and launched our own Wholething website in Umbraco 7. 

17th July 2018

With the help of Matt Chick, we built the Colchester Digital website in Umbraco 7 with Bootstrap 4. I knew this was perfect to replace Wholething CMS for our clients. 

1st August 2018

With the help of Simon Steed, we launched our first client Umbraco site. 

My first in-person Umbraco Event

7th November 2018

My first Umbraco event was UK Fest 

Matt Chick and I moved that month’s Colchester Digital “The Power and Security of lightweight JavaScript Frameworks” to the Wednesday night and the following day we attended our first ‘in person’ Umbraco event, UK Fest, in the Barbican. I had attended many Tech conferences over the years, but this was different from most, even though it was a large event it still had a fantastic community feel. 

People were asking if I would be attending CodeGarden the following year. I had heard of CodeGarden and from what people said it sounded like a fantastic event. 

Organizing my first Conference

10th May 2019

So, it took a while, but we finally organised Colchester’s first Digital Conference, “Colchester Digital Conference – The Process” covering all the disciplines you would find in a digital agency. 

We ran a very well attended monthly meetup the night before for the members, speakers and sponsors. We had some very proud representatives from Essex County Council, Tendring District Council and Colchester Town Council who had helped us get started. 

The event the following day was amazing. Colchester is relatively small town and everyone in creative and digital knows each other but rarely meets up. Colchester Digital’s conference changed that. Agencies, designers and developers who had not spoken to each other for years fill the atriums between talks and there was a real buzz about it. 

Everyone involved was so please with the event we all agreed to do it bigger and better the following year… 

My first colostomy

5th February 2023

Kick-off was at 16:30 on a Sunday afternoon I was watching my team Tottenham Hotspur playing Manchester City and we were winning! I should have felt great, but I didn’t feel right at all. For the first time in years I had the severe pain I used to get from diverticulosis. 

My family kept asking me to call 111 but I kept saying I was fine… I clearly was not. My stomach was swelling up like a balloon and eventually I was in such pain I had no choice and called. 

I was advised to immediately call an ambulance, I was very lucky, there was one parked four minutes away. When they arrived, they said I had suffered a ruptured bowel (a diverticula had burst). I was pumped full of painkillers and rushed to Colchester Hospital. 

My body went into shock from Peritonitis so for the first 24 hours they tried to stabilise me. Within 48 hours I was told I was dying from severe sepsis, and I would need a section of my bowel removed to save my life. I would also have a stoma. I immediately said yes. 

About 30% of people with a ruptured colon do not survive. This rises to 70% if the patient develops peritonitis.

I had lots of problems with the colostomy. I was fighting multiple infections and none of the antibiotics were working, my stoma did not work for nearly two weeks, and I was losing weight rapidly. 

But eventually things started to turn around and after one month in recovery I was able to return home, 70 pounds and a length of large intestine lighter, but home.

My first Umbraco MVP nomination

7th March 2023

I arrived home from hospital to a message from Warren Buckley: 

I know your emails is last on your priorities whilst getting better. But to let you know I emailed you to let you know someone has put you forward to apply for an Umbraco MVP - Warren Buckley

A few days later I had a visit from Warren Buckley who brought me a gift from Umbraco HQ, I was very surprised and humbled. 

He also explained about being nominated for an Umbraco MVP award and if accepted I would get a free trip to CodeGarden 2023! Except I could barely walk and clearly would not be able to attend. 

I didn't really understand the application process at the time, the fact that you had to add activities you have done over the past year. I had not made a note of any of them but felt that if somebody had gone to the trouble of nominating me or should at least take up the offer and began listing activities in the MVP website. 

A month or so later I received an e-mail from the MVP team saying that I had not been successful this year, but they appreciated all of my hard work and to try again next year. 

So that June I joined CodeGarden online. 

Releasing my first Umbraco Starter Kit

30th May 2023

In 2022 I had been working on a side project to learn Blazor and Razor Pages. I was deliberately using Bootstrap so I could create web templates for the Umbraco community. Of course, this suddenly stopped when I was in hospital. 

When I came out of hospital Bootstrap had released a new version that supported CSS Grid behind a flag. I was bored and in recovery so decided to try adding it to my project, it worked very well. 

I showed Aaron Sadler at Umbhost who said if I make it into a community starter kit, he will help make it live and host it for free under his Umbraco Community Plan. 

At the same time Block Grid had been released in Umbraco 10.4.0, which I had the honour of consulting on with Umbraco HQ during its development, but it was not responsive. 

I could not resist and set about combining the two to create responsive layouts using CSS Grid and Block Grid as well as CSS Flexbox and Block List. 

I started thinking about the best way to share it and saw that Umbraco itself was released as a .Net Template, so why not a starter kit? 

So I asked in Umbraco Discord: 

"Would a dotnet new template be a better option for a starter kit than a NuGet package? //cc @Lotte"

Lotte Pitcher came to the rescue and organised an Umbracollab to convert UmBootstrap to a .Net Template. You can learn about this here: 

https://24days.in/umbraco-cms/2023/dotnet-project-template/ 

Although I was still in recovery, I felt much more useful and less isolated. 

My first ileostomy

9th October 2023

In October 2023 I was offered a reversal of my original Hartmann's procedure. This would remove the colostomy and re-connect my bowel. 

There are many risks and it wasn't an easy decision, but because of several complications with my colostomy I decided to go ahead. 

The operation did not go as planned and took over 11 hours ending in my colostomy being converted to an ileostomy. 

Again, my new stoma refused to work, and I went through a lot of unpleasant procedures before it did. 

After two weeks it was working well enough for me to go home but I still had a lot of complications from the surgery. 

My second Umbraco MVP nomination

13th March 2024

A new year and a new Umbraco MVP nomination: 

I'm writing to let you know you have been nominated as someone deserving of receiving an Umbraco MVP Award, congratulations! Please ensure you have your application completed by 11:59 (CEST) on Friday March 29th.

I just couldn’t do it. I was in and out of hospital for tests with a possible ileostomy reversal operation a few weeks later I didn’t even consider applying. 

My first stoma reversal

21st February 2024

Just over a year after my original surgery I got the all clear for a second attempt at a full reversal. 

18th April 2024

I was overwhelmed with emotion I really hadn't had time to contemplate being awarded an Umbraco MVP.  

Congratulations, we’re delighted to inform you that you’re a new Umbraco MVP for 2024/2025! 🎉

21st March 2024

My reversal operation was successful, sore but successful. 

25th March 2024

Just over a year after I leaving hospital with a colostomy I returned home stoma free. 

29th March 2024

I had arrived home on the Monday and by Friday I was starting to feel a little better. Enough to want to apply for the MVP award. 

I replied to Lucy Brailsford and explained the situation and she replied under the circumstances they could give me a little bit more time. 

The deadline was a Friday but it was a bank holiday weekend so HQ would not be going into work until the Tuesday. That was enough for me, I logged into the MVP website, and I wrote all the contributions I had made that year and sent it on the Tuesday morning. 

My first trip to Denmark

11th June 2024

It was touch and go right up until the last minute whether I would be able to attend. 

Some wonderful community members, Warren Buckley, Paul Seal and Ravi Motha who had been many times before, looked after me on the flight and Laura Weatherhead on the train journey to Odense. 

I was told the best place to head to after checking in was Storms Pakhus, the largest street food market in Odense. 

My first Storms Pakhus

11th June 2024

I had seen a few reviews of Storms Pakhus from previous attendees and it is indeed an impressive food hall with a really friendly atmosphere. 

As I walked in, I saw a lot of people I recognised from the community and as I looked around, I saw Lucy and Matt Brailsford arrive. I was so pleased as I wanted to thank Lucy for her patience with me being unsure about applying and attending. But my emotions got the better of me and Matt and Lucy comforted me until I was able to speak. 

It began to dawn on me that I had made it to Codegarden at last when I really thought I would not be attending any events ever again. I felt a little overwhelmed but very happy.  

My first visit to Umbraco HQ

11th June 2024

The first night we were all invited to visit Umbraco HQ for an 80s themed Pre-party. 

It was great to meet all of the HQ members I had engaged with in online events over the years. 

Especially Paul Seal and Rick Butterfield who both helped me with UmBootstrap. 

Lots of people got into the 80s theme and one or two of us did not have to go out of our way to find our outfits! 

My first Codegarden

12th June 2024

After the ‘Welcome to Codegarden’  talk the first activity of the first day was the Umbraco Keynote which brought us up to date with everything Umbraco. 

This was followed by the MVP presentations. I was incredibly proud to be sharing the stage with so many talented people, especially Warren Buckley, who has influenced and supported me with everything Umbraco since I started using it. 

It was everything I expected and more. I was very lucky I've been involved in the community for quite a while so I was not sure of company for various events although I did choose to spend some time either on my own or meeting new people. 

I was very interested in the upcoming release of the new back office so I picked my talks accordingly. 

The venue was absolutely fantastic. 

13th June 2024

So there's me, right in the middle of code garden first timers. 

Dean Leigh

Dean is an Umbraco MVP who has been making web stuff since 1996.

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