Codegarden 2025 Recap from the ProWorks Team

Just over a week ago, Jen, Janae, and I returned from Umbraco Codegarden 2025. We’re catching up on emails and sleep, and we’re still buzzing from the energy, connection, and ideas we brought home. Codegarden is like no other conference we've attended: its fun, welcoming, insightful, and gives us a peek at what's coming in the world of Umbraco. This year, Jen gave a fun and super informative talk on her favorite Umbraco Packages / Add-ons and all three were renewed as Umbraco MVPs!

MVP Renewals

First up: we’re thrilled to share that Jen Wolke, Janae Cram, and I (Jason Prothero) all had our Umbraco MVP status renewed this year! We're honored to continue contributing to the Umbraco community and are grateful to be recognized alongside so many amazing people.

Jen Presents Her Favorite Umbraco Packages 

The audience was taken on an adventure as Jen took everyone "Into the Umbazon". She presented and demoed some of her favorite packages in the Umbraco community and had a cool "choose your own adventure"-style theme to have a little fun with it! She also created a section of her site on her personal site to let everyone experience the adventure after Codegarden was finished: Into the Umbazon!

I was able to attend her talk and there were some great recommendations in there that I hadn't had a chance to try.  #h5yr Jen!

Jason’s Highlights

For me, Codegarden is always a fun time to reconnect with old friends, meet new ones, and get inspired by the incredible things happening across the Umbraco ecosystem.

This year was especially exciting because we released our TinyMCE Umbraco package just before the conference. It was great to hear feedback from the community and a special moment to see it mentioned in the keynote!

One of the biggest themes this year was AI. The new Umbraco MCP project (created by Matthew Wise and Phil Whitaker) was one of the most talked-about things at the conference. I was lucky enough to sit down with them during the hackathon and get help getting it set up. Huge thanks to both of them!

Janae’s Reflections

If you asked me to define Codegarden, I would tell you "it's a family reunion I get to attend once a year, but with people I like". And if I'm going to be honest, my favorite part of the entire week was the beautifully sunny Thursday afternoon where I sat outside the venue with a glass (or two) of wine, chatted with old friends, and made some new ones. I'm not sure that this is something people say about tech communities very often, but it's one of the things I love the most about this particular community.

It was a long week for me - I had the MVP summit on Monday/Tuesday, assisted with the Astro & Umbraco workshop Tuesday afternoon, and then jumped into Codegarden itself for the rest of the week. There were so many amazing talks including technical ones that I can't wait to dig into (I highly recommend both Callum and Kenn's talks on search), but my top four were not technical at all. Jason's presentation on Ritual, Joke's talk about managing time, Erica's pointers on privilege, and Matt's confessions about neurodiversity deeply resonated with me, and I'll be taking aspects out of all of them to incorporate into my daily life.

I miss everyone already and I can't wait for the US Festival (I'm speaking, btw) as well as the chance to see all my "found family" at our next reunion in Copenhagen!

Jen’s Takeaways

Jen soaked up insights from across the conference, both as an attendee and a speaker.

Favorite sessions:

• The Keynote – lots of exciting updates about what’s next for Umbraco
• Jemima Abu on Accessibility – passionate, practical, and engaging
• Jason Wodicka on Ritual – a masterclass in storytelling and community-building
• Matt Brailsford on Neurodivergence – vulnerable and valuable advice for creating inclusive workplaces

She’s especially excited about upcoming Umbraco features:

• Umbraco Compose – a new orchestration layer for data integrations
• Cloud improvements – hostname monitoring, app settings in the portal, WAF upgrades, and DDoS detection
• Search enhancements – support for additional providers and improved configurability

Jen also had the honor of serving on the Package Awards jury!

Until Next Time

At the end of the day, Codegarden is about people. Yes, we love the roadmap reveals, the deep dives into performance and packages, and the spontaneous whiteboard ideas from the hackathon. But it’s the community spirit, the support, and the sense of belonging that makes this event so powerful.

We already miss everyone and we’re counting down to the next get-together at the Umbraco US Festival.

Until then, we’ll be back at work, inspired, grateful, and building cool things.