Written by: Alice Meng
Company name: Rockstar Games
Job Role: Web Developer
Country: United States
For how long have you been working with Umbraco?
I've been working with Umbraco (on and off) for 6 years, at three different locations. Started with version 6! Things have changed a lot since then.
My favorite Umbraco moments are always the ones where a client is unexpectedly (and pleasantly) surprised by the ease of use and instant understanding of the back office. They're often expecting that "training" to use the back-office will mean requiring something totally unintuitive.
I’ve been working with Umbraco in a variety of (very) different companies, so seeing the myriad of setups and exploring ways to make the editor experience easier have been the most fun.
I started my Umbraco career on the content editing side. Back then, I was a marketing and accounting student on track to finish her CPA (glad I did not!), and I was doing part-time work in a web boutique.
When I graduated and started working, I realized I could take the business route and stay as an analyst, or I could recognize myself as a developer. My experiences with using Umbraco in the past definitely worked with my job experience to make that decision happen.
I love that Umbraco has evolved so much over the years and has become even more friendly to use for both developers and content editors. Sometimes I have some side tasks or initial sites in another CMS that are to be converted, and I can’t exactly compare other CMS to the Umbraco experience.
In 2019 I finally got a chance to start exploring the community side of Umbraco, which has also been great fun! I usually have event conflicts with Codegarden, but I got to go to Codecabin 2019 and explore the UK for a bit, which was great fun. I’d certainly recommend going to Codecabin for others in the US who have not gotten the chance to go to an Umbraco event, and may prefer a smaller group size.
I'm a bit of a sudoku fanatic, so I'm currently working on my own ASCII sudoku in my free time. I’m hoping to finish up my personal website sometime in 2020, but we’ll see.
Umbraco newbies can learn a whole lot from making their own projects from scratch, even if they are "just" back-office users. It provides some context for the process that they may or may not have to follow, and (hopefully) some compassion.
Teaching newbies is a lot of fun! Newbies, reach out, we get enjoyment from seeing enthusiasm before it leaves you!
I have a lot of things I'd like to do, in no particular order. For 2020, I’d like to explore ways to use dev skills for public good - that’s certainly an aspiration for me. My main focus is exploring more of the .NET world and levelling up my skill set!
I’ve been working remotely full time since mid-2019, but I have an image from my old desk at work, which has (in no particular order):
👉 A houseplant that moves during the day
👉 An Atlona box, empty, marked R for Receiver
👉 A candy dish for visitors (won during a raffle)
👉 A dish filled with air plants, with a miniature of the Empire State Building and Big Ben and a paper plane (prediction for me going to London in 2019?)
👉 And a printout of bootstrap 4 grid options, for easy reference :)
I'm currently reading through the short stories of Nikolai Gogol. The collection follows Gogol as he went from Ukraine to St Petersburg, with stories written in both times. The stories' style and themes change a lot and evolve into a new final form. I read a lot of Russian, Indian, and Chinese fairy tales as a kid and Gogol’s early works certainly have connections to folklore and mystical elements. It’s a lot of fun!
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H5YR, Alice! What an exciting Umbraco journey! 😍
If you’d like to connect with Alice, you can find her on:
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