Codegarden 2026: I went to Copenhagen for a week

Last week I flew out to Copenhagen for the Umbraco Codegarden conference. It was my second Codegarden, after Odense in 2025, and only the third time I've left the country, which made the whole week feel extra special before I'd even landed.

2026 was a special year for Codegarden itself too. It returned to Copenhagen, the city where the very first Codegarden was held back in 2005. Two decades on, the conference now pulls in hundreds in person and a similar number watching online, which gives you a sense of how far the community has come.

This year also brought my fourth MVP renewal. It's a milestone that doesn't quite sink in until you're back home, but being recognised by HQ and the community for another year means a lot.

The MVP Summit

Monday and Tuesday were given over to the MVP Summit. Conversations there are under a friendly NDA so I'll keep the contents to myself, but the format is what you'd expect: two days of MVPs and Umbraco HQ working through what's going well, what isn't, and where the products and community should be heading. The sessions themselves are valuable, and so is the chance to meet MVPs from elsewhere in the world properly rather than just over Discord and Slack.

The keynote and Umbraco Automate

Wednesday opened with the main Codegarden keynote, and for me the headline of the whole week was the announcement of Umbraco Automate. Automate brings event-driven workflow automation directly into the backoffice. You build flows on a visual canvas by connecting triggers (content, media, and member events) with actions like HTTP requests, sending email, or publishing content. Add-on packages cover Slack, Forms, Commerce, Engage, AI, and Deploy, and every run is logged with per-step inputs, outputs, and timing. A beta for Umbraco 17 went live on the day, with the full release scheduled for 9 July.

For me, Automate arrives at exactly the right time. The next UmbPanel release will use Automate to replace a chunk of the hand-written orchestration I've built up over the years, which streamlines the codebase considerably and frees me up to move faster on the parts of UmbPanel that genuinely differentiate it.

The sessions

The sessions I went to across Wednesday and Thursday were a mix of forward-looking strategy and practical engineering:

• Beyond the Gate: What's Ahead for CMS?
• Debugging Teams: What High-Performing Developer Teams Do Differently
• It's Elemental: reuse your content!
• Umbraco in AI
• Hybrid Cache changes everything
• After the AI Hype: What's Real, What's Next
• Unlocking the Umbraco Management API: Beyond the Backoffice
• Tales from Middle Earth

The standout for me was Richard Campbell, who gave two talks across the week. The first was "Above the Cloud: Building Data Centers in Space" at the MVP Summit on Tuesday, and the second was "After the AI Hype: What's Real, What's Next" at Codegarden proper on Thursday. Both were excellent. Richard is one of the hosts of .NET Rocks and brings a level of breadth and historical perspective you don't often get from talks pitched at a single product or framework. The AI Hype talk in particular cut through a lot of the noise and was a useful counterweight to some of the more breathless takes you hear elsewhere.

Hybrid Cache changes everything was another highlight. It walked through the performance gains the team have measured since Hybrid Cache was introduced, and the numbers are genuinely impressive. For anyone running Umbraco at any kind of scale (GreenStack very much included) this is the sort of foundational improvement you feel everywhere once it's bedded in.

Tales from Middle Earth was a different flavour again. It covered the work Effect have done in New Zealand, including with the government and on alerting systems, and it's a great example of Umbraco stretching well beyond the marketing-site use cases people sometimes assume it's limited to.

The people

The thing that always makes Codegarden is the people, and this year was no different. I spent time with a wide range of attendees across the week, including a good chunk of the Growcreate crew, which is always nice given how much my work runs alongside theirs. Justin Nevitt was my hotel buddy, so we walked to and from the venue together most days and had plenty of time to discuss sessions, packages, and where we each think the platform is heading.

Both the Tuesday and Wednesday evening dinners were great, and the Thursday night entertainment was top notch. The Thursday evening at Codegarden has a reputation that's hard to convey to anyone who hasn't been to one, and this year more than lived up to it.

The journey home

The trip back didn't quite go to plan. Baggage handlers and ground crew at the airport walked out on strike at 5pm, which made for an interesting end to the week. Everyone got home eventually, but it was a reminder that the conference itself is only half the adventure.

Looking back

Codegarden has a way of leaving you with more ideas than you can sensibly act on in a week, and 2026 was no exception. Automate alone has already shifted the shape of the next UmbPanel release, and I'll be working through the rest of the takeaways over the coming months. There's also UMBUK26 to start thinking about properly now that Codegarden is out of the way.

More than any one talk or announcement though, what stays with me is the people. I always enjoy meeting up with fellow Umbracians at these events and getting stuck into conversations about the CMS, packages, and where the industry is heading. And as someone who deals with self-esteem issues, the friendliness and acceptance of the Umbraco community makes a real difference. Walking into a room where you know people are genuinely glad to see you isn't something I take for granted. It's a generosity of spirit that's rare in tech, where people are quick to share what they know, quick to introduce you to someone new, and quick to celebrate each other's wins. It's the reason I keep coming back, and the reason I'd recommend Codegarden to anyone working with Umbraco in any capacity. Roll on next year.