I have just recovered from my trip to Denmark for the 3 day CodeGarden festival, which is an event that celebrates the content management System Umbraco: Aside from the talks the main highlights for me were Umbraco bingo and the package contest. If you have never heard of Umbraco you can learn more here.
As for the Bingo… my psychiatrist has suggested not to try and recall the memories, she fears they may inflict further damage. It consisted of live tattoos, marching bands, kazoos, pillow fights, Elvis impersonators and organ players. We’ll leave it at that.
The package contest, which was on the last day, wrapped-up the festival. Participants had 5 minutes to show off new packages that they have created for Umbraco (developers create packages to extend the core functionality of Umbraco), the audience then decided who was worthy of the top prize.
This years CodeGarden had 10 entries ranging from the genius to the ridiculous. I’ve posted the 3 winners below.
1st Place – uBrokeIt
Built By: Tim Payne @attack_monkey
Prize: 3D MakerBot Printer
Usefulness: 10/10
Ethicalness: 1/10
Probably the funniest package of the competition, uBrokeIt is a package that randomly introduces bugs into your Umbraco installation so you can theoretically charge your client for the extra work required to fix them. Bugs include randomly deleting nodes, disabling context menus and my favourite: having a marching band take over the screen (the whole marching band thing is a bit of an in joke from the Umbraco Bingo). The package should be released next week.
2nd Place – Optimise It – Project Page
Built By: Morten Christensen @sitereactor
Prize: Thingamagoop an analog and digital synthiser
Created by my wonderful Umbraco on Azure Co Host, this package basically makes your site run faster by parsing your stylesheets for errors, minifying stylesheets, optimizing images in the stylesheet, embeding images within stylesheets and finally it generates image sprites. It also has the added bonus of being able to prettify stylesheets that have been previously minimised.
3rd Place – uBackChat – Project Page
Built By: Lee Kelleher @leekelleher
Prize: Useless Machine
This package enables IM chats from within the Umbraco administration screen so that back office users can send each other messages and collaborate. It looked a little bit like Facebook chat and got a great reaction from the audience.
