As described in our call for applicants, this team will meet 4 times per year and work as a sounding board for the Heartcore and CMS product and development teams, meaning they will contribute through knowledge, insight, and opinions rather than through code or technical work. The interest to join the team has been overwhelming and it's not been an easy process filtering out applications - mainly because all applicants were great! We ultimately picked 11, which is 1 more than initially planned, but we think this is a strong and interesting group for our first-ever Headless Community Team.
I’m happy to announce that the team has now been chosen. Please welcome:
The Community Voices
Gary Boon (@garyboon)
Shout Digital Limited
"I've been in the software engineering and digital agency space for most of my career. Having started my career as a software engineer in the financial services sector, I subsequently held roles as Technical Director, CTO, and CEO within digital agencies. I'm always looking at the future of technology and how best to apply it to real-world challenges.
“With headless and API-first conversations, the digital landscape continues to evolve at pace, none more so than in the DXP space. I hope to bring a blend of technical and business experience to help contribute to the future direction of Umbraco Heartcore, liaising directly with the Umbraco team.”
Jeffrey Schoemaker (@JeffreyPerplex)
Perplex Digital
"I'm in love with Umbraco for more than 12 years already and love contributing to the CMS. I'm happy that I've received the Umbraco MVP award for six years in a row! My background is IT & I started as a developer at my current company. In the last couple of years I became the owner of Perplex (an Umbraco Gold Partner).
"We are now more than 80 persons and we develop the coolest (Umbraco) solutions in the world. So in the last years, I look at most IT/Development/Umbraco solutions from a business & marketing perspective and I would like to contribute that to the community team. What is the value for the end user / the client, what is necessary to convince them, and how we can bridge the gap between developers & IT on the one side, and the clients/business/marketing on the other side. Furthermore, I've started uMarketingSuite three years ago; a software company that creates the coolest Umbraco package in the whole universe when it comes to personalization, digital analytics, a/b-testing & profiling.
"My experience with headless is pretty limited; I've been always looking into it, tried & researched some stuff, but never got the feeling that this ("headless") was the most important trend to jump onto. This is the perfect opportunity for me to dive deeper into this world and share my experiences (and those of the 80 persons working at my company) with Umbraco HQ and vice versa."
Emmanuel Tissera (@dAmazingNut)
Luminary
"I started on Headless CMSes in 2016 with a competitor long before Heartcore beta (known as Umbraco Headless then) was announced in early 2018. Working with content management systems for the last 18 years and headless over the past seven years, I have practical experience, gotchas, best practices, and tales of things gone wrong.
“I have been a staunch advocate of Umbraco Heartcore and Headless in general spreading the knowledge and experience to developers, marketers, and critical stakeholders. Working for Emirates in the past has also given me insights into internalisation and localisation. I would love to use this knowledge to collaborate with other community team members to shape the future of headless with Umbraco. I also look forward to learning from the rest of the community team members as I believe they have a wealth of knowledge to share.
"I've been working with Umbraco CMS since 2009. Remember those XSLT days? That's how I came to know about Umbraco! I've been organising the Umbraco Melbourne meetup since 2018 and I am a Umbraco MVP three times running. I'm the Technical Director at Luminary, an Australian digital agency, where I advise clients and developers alike on Solution Architecture, CMS selection and headless strategies.”
Sem Snel
IO
"Corné Hoskam (MVP) and Jeroen Breuer (former MVP) are my primary collaborators. My organization and I will be excited if the standard Umbraco package or Heartcore renders my boilerplate obsolete. They are enthused and have advised me to contribute. For my organization and the rest of the Umbraco community, I'm eager to participate and ensure a smooth transition to a new headless Umbraco!
“I work part-time as a .NET developer at the company iO while continuing to pursue my education in software engineering at Avans University of Applied Sciences. The development and maintenance of a headless Umbraco boilerplate fall under my responsibility. I started as an intern at iO last year. During my internship, I researched the use of Blazor in addition to a headless Umbraco API, resulting in the headless Umbraco boilerplate.”
Andy Eva-Dale
Tangent Marketing Ltd.
Andy provides consultancy and delivers enterprise digital transformation for global brands. He has worked with organisations like the London Stock Exchange, Accenture, BAE Systems, and WPP. Andy has over 20 years experience of architecting, building, support & maintaining; award-winning, complex systems for the likes of SAP, IWG, Grant Thornton, Aegon, UKPN, and Sky.
Andy is the Technical Director at Tangent and mentors a 45+ strong department, creating cloud-first, scalable, robust, secure, globally distributed applications. Andy is active in the community championing sustainable system design, diversity in tech, and dyslexia awareness by speaking at conferences across Europe, meet-ups, and to organisations. In addition, he is a member of SaaS products steering groups and the BIMA innovation council.
“My work with SAP, Regis, UK Power Networks, and Egis has incorporated JAMStack architectures, we used Heartcore the latter two. I have worked with Umbraco since v4.x and have always been a big fan. Now I am looking to bring my experience to the table and help shape a better product for the future of Heartcore.”
Mikkel Keller
Novicell UK
"I am passionate about composable MACH architecture and headless principles. I would love to contribute with the knowledge and know-how I have gained from building and using performant and scalable headless libraries on a large number of Umbraco projects over the years. Ultimately, help bring headless technology to a broader audience.
“I am a long-time Umbraco passionate and seasoned software architect with deep roots in the internet industry and a background in computer science. I have more than 20 years of experience as a developer, software architect, and manager, and I have been working with Umbraco for the last 15 years. This adventure has given me a comprehensive knowledge of internet technologies, software principles, patterns, and enterprise architecture.”
Andrew McKaskill
Great State
"I've been working with Umbraco for the past 2 years on a complex headless site with multiple frontends using a mix of technologies. I've previously spent 15+ years integrating and developing enterprise business software and websites and have seen lots of different types of integrations and APIs.
“I attended Codegarden 2022 and was astounded by how much Umbraco listens to and cares about its community. Headless technologies are right up my alley and when I saw the announcement asking for submissions for a headless community team I knew I had to apply. I appreciate users who take the time to give feedback on items I've developed and help make them better, and the ability to do the same for Umbraco is exciting.”
Miguel Pinto (@miguelcrpinto)
DEPT
"In the past couple of years, Headless CMSs have become a trend enabling content sharing between different applications. Umbraco is a developer-friendly CMS but (excluding Heartcore) is lacking any API/Headless approach when it comes to content access.
"Considering how long I’ve been using Umbraco and my experience and knowledge in headless CMSs, I decided this was the opportunity to give some love back to the community and help Umbraco shape good headless products.
“I'm a Portuguese senior .NET developer living and working in The Netherlands for 11 years and counting. Working for DEPT® (formerly known as TamTam) since then, I've been introduced to Umbraco back in the 4.7 version days and I’ve experienced the Umbraco evolution including V5 and Heartcore. I’ve been an early adopter of Umbraco Heartcore and made some small contributions to the Umbraco Heartcore .NET Client Library."
Poornima Nayar (@PoornimaNayar)
Independent Freelancer
"Umbraco Heartcore is a product I really love for its versatility. I hope to work closely with the team, understand more about the product, and help in making Umbraco Heartcore a solid headless offering with a growing feature set.
“I have been using Heartcore in my personal and hobby projects. From Blazor to IoT to MAUI I have experimented with it all!”
Marcin Zajkowski (@zajkowskimarcin)
Novicell
"I've been in the software engineering and digital agency space for most of my career. Having started my career as a software engineer in the financial services sector, I subsequently held roles as Technical Director, CTO, and CEO within digital agencies. I'm always looking at the future of technology and how best to apply it to real-world challenges.
“With headless and API-first conversations, the digital landscape continues to evolve at pace, none more so than in the DXP space. I hope to bring a blend of technical and business experience to help contribute to the future direction of Umbraco Heartcore, liaising directly with the Umbraco team.”
Roy Barber (@roybarberuk)
dotcentric
"Working at Dotcentric, I'm Leading the frontend development team to Build responsive and reusable design systems for enterprise e-commerce and CMS. Strong knowledge of Accessibility, design systems, and component libraries using HTML/CSS and Vanilla ES5/6 Javascript as well as frameworks like VueJs.
“As a frontend developer this is usually very difficult, but the rise of headless and static CDN hosted sites is something that interests me and Dotcentric. Something I’m looking to push forward both in Web2 and Web3”
And pitching in from HQ
From HQ we’ll be represented by Morten Christensen and Lasse Fredslund. Morten is heading up the Heartcore team and is responsible for the Umbraco Cloud Platform and has worked for Umbraco since 2011. Among a number of projects, Morten was the lead on the big Cloud Platform update last year and the launch of Umbraco Heartcore in 2019 and he continues to be involved with the development of Heartcore on a daily basis. In his current role, he is also deeply involved in the overall strategy of Umbraco Cloud - including the underlying Cloud Platform and Heartcore’s Content Delivery Platform.
Lasse Fredslund, Umbraco CMS Product Owner
Lasse Fredslund joined Umbraco in February this year as product owner for the CMS. Here he works with prioritizing features and functionality ensuring they add the most value to all of us. He will be participating in this team and handling the CMS side of things and, more importantly, ensure that we get as much out of this awesome team as possible.
Feel free to reach out
As always with Umbraco, we are open to hearing your input or thoughts, and if you have anything on your mind that you think would be a good subject for the Headless Community Team to discuss please let us know at headless@umbraco.com 📧