uProfile June 2019: Rachel Breeze
Working for:Â Sigma Consulting Solutions
Job role:Â Senior Developer
Country:Â UK
Time working with Umbraco:Â 6 years
What's your favourite Umbraco moment?
There are far too many to choose from; I really enjoyed attending the Umbraco UK Fest Hackathon and having my first pull-request accepted, it felt great to be giving back. The hackathon even featured in a talk I gave at our local meet up:Â @MaccTech.
It was pretty cool when the first Umbraco website I worked on at Sigma was nominated for a Northern Digital Award.
Another memorable moment was attending Codegarden for the first-time sharing knowledge and catching up with people I had met at Umbraco training courses or via Twitter; the Umbraco community is friendly and welcoming.
What in your Umbraco career are you most proud of?
I am really pleased that as a community we’ve recently come together to work on improving the accessibility of the Umbraco 8 backoffice. We want editors to enjoy the experience of working with Umbraco. It is really important to me that users who want to manage content using a screen reader or by using other accessibility tools should be able to edit content easily. I have enjoyed being part of driving this forward. You can read more about this here:
https://www.wearesigma.com/news/improving-the-accessibility-of-the-umbraco-cms-back-office/
What about Umbraco keeps you coming back for more?
Lots of reasons keep bringing me back, so here are a few key ones:
- Umbraco is such an intuitive CMS. It means we can deliver clients the functionality they want and allow them to manage content easily.
- Using Umbraco means we can build sites easily as part of the agile development processes.
- Because it’s built on top of the C# Microsoft MVC framework, sites can be integrated with other systems such as PIMs or CRM and extended easily.
What are you currently working on?
I’m the development lead for a couple of projects:
- A B2B site for a company that lists 500,000 bus parts. This is built using Umbraco, uCommerce and has a number of integrations including with the ERP system Syspro.  It’s been live in the UK for a while and has just launched in America. We are also preparing it for launch in the Southern hemisphere next month.
- I am also working with a national agency building a platform in Umbraco that identifies transformative medical technologies with potential economic and patient care benefits.
What are your top 3 best tips for an Umbraco newbie?
- Attend Umbraco meetups and conferences, you will meet inspirational people and learn the latest about Umbraco.
- Help content editors out by using the terminology they use, name document types and properties based on their terminology. Also, give document types and properties descriptions that define what they do.
- Get involved; don’t be afraid to ask questions on our.umbraco.com, raise (and possibly fix) issues and enjoy being a part of the Umbraco community.
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Any aspirations for your future?
Doing more talks on development and Umbraco.
What book series are you reading now?
I am a massive Terry Pratchett fan; his writing is a perfect blend of satire and science fiction. I am re-reading the Discworld series, currently reading Moving Pictures.
Do you have a hidden talent?
Not sure if it’s a talent, but I am learning to play the clarinet.
Tell us something unexpected about yourself
I have ridden a horse underwater in a quarry in Northern England and whilst in New Zealand, I jumped out of a plane.
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A massive H5YR to Rachel 😀! If you’d like to connect with Rachel you can find her on Twitter: @breezerachel and LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachel-breeze/
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