A big thank you to 🙌🏻
I will introduce the new team shortly, but first I would like to thank the Package Team's outgoing members (spoiler alert! - not all from the team are “retiring” 😅). A huge thanks to Kevin Jump, Nik Rimington, Dave Woestenborghs, and David Brendel. It has been a pleasure working with you and I very much appreciate all your feedback and contributions to the team you’ve all given throughout the years! 🙏
Big thanks also go out to the many applicants! I’m very happy to see this level of attention and engagement, that really warms my package heart. We’ve received many qualified applications and everyone had good reasons for wanting to join the team, which didn’t make the process of putting a team together easy. So, without further ado, let me introduce you to the new Package Team 👏
Meet the new Package Team!
Callum Whyte
By day I am the "Chief Bumpster" at Gold Partner Bump Digital – which basically means I do anything and everything – by night I do whatever I can to stay involved with the technical side of things! I have a long history with Umbraco and the community.
You've possibly used one of my packages like Meganav or Search Extensions, seen one of my talks, joined an event or BBQ I organized, or tuned in to UmbraCoffee! I'm fortunate to have been an Umbraco MVP for the past 5 years and a Microsoft MVP for 3 years.
Why join the Package Team? I'm really passionate about making sure the Umbraco ecosystem is as compelling as possible, both for devs and our end clients. I'm going to be advocating for creating more consistent backoffice experiences around things like authentication and license management in packages and integrations – bringing some polish to what we already have. We do a fair amount of back-office customisation, not just packages, and I won't lie that I'm a little nervous about the new back-office being primarily a backend developer... I'm hoping to share a lot of insights with the community as I learn things (and will encourage HQ to do the same!), so the transition is as smooth as possible.
Carl Sargunar
I've been working with Umbraco since the v4 launch of the CMS and despite doing a lot of other things, I've always tried to keep involved in the Umbraco and keep up to date with what's happening to the platform. However, I've never had the opportunity until recently to get involved in the core CMS after getting involved in hackathons and core contributions.
With the continued changes coming with the new back-office, I saw a wonderful opportunity to get involved with the Package Team, and I hope to continue to use meetups, conference talks and more to share my experience in both customizing and building new packages for the back-office. I genuinely think that the future looks very exciting for the platform, and I hope my enthusiasm for it helps others in the community to come along on this amazing ride!
Outside of work I have an amazing family, my wonderful wife Ceri and 3 kids keep me busy and active. We love travel, the outdoors life - swimming, cycling, and walking, and are hoping to add a couple of furry new additions to the family in the near future. I am a strong believer in the ideas of equality and diversity making us all better, and I'm also a part of the Umbraco Diffs team, and wherever I possibly can I try to use my privilege to help others get a leg up in life.
Dennis Heutinck
I was introduced to Umbraco three and half years ago when I started my first job as an ASP.NET developer in the Netherlands. Umbraco has fascinated me right from the beginning. Among other things, I am responsible for my company's online presence in the Umbraco community through support and package maintenance.
The community has given me new perspectives, challenges, and opportunities. I love helping out fellow developers and the community has convinced me to start my own blog. Through the community and my blog, I've found a new objective: making high code quality more accessible for developers. This is something I have struggled with myself.
I aim to lower the bar for high code quality by researching relevant topics and setting examples so that everybody may benefit from it. Watching how my efforts pay off in my company and in the community makes me very happy 😊
It's for this reason that I applied to the community Package Team: whether you're a senior developer with a million years of experience or you're just starting out, building packages of high quality and publishing your work should be easy, accessible, and fun. Joining this team gives me an opportunity to expand my efforts to all of you awesome people out there. I hope that my involvement will lower the bar for better code quality and that it may inspire you to share your packages with the world.
Outside of work, I enjoy a good waffle with a cup of coffee at the café, a fun puzzle or board game, or a box of LEGOs.
Lotte Pitcher
I am honoured to be staying on the Package Team for another year. I have learned so much since I joined, and have enjoyed helping to share this knowledge with the wider community. This has involved documentation, tooling, starting a new virtual packages meetup and giving talks.
I look forward to doing much more of the same, but of course bigger and better! The challenge of the new backoffice especially means it's going to be a busy year ahead.
I am 6 times Umbraco MVP and an active member of the Umbraco community. I help run the London meetups and other virtual events/hackathons, am a co-host of the Candid Contributions podcast, and am excited to be hosting the Thursday night shenanigans at Codegarden again this year (I don't think this is a secret? #cgrumours )
Marc Love
I have been working with Umbraco since version 4. I began introducing it into the agencies I worked for before starting up my own digital agency in 2011 with my colleague Paul Daly specializing in Umbraco development. Seeing the need to be able to build Umbraco websites quicker and more efficiently in order to compete with the bigger agencies we were up against we set about building a starter kit for Umbraco. Fast forward to today and we are now the proud owners of uSkinned Site Builder which we sell to agencies, freelancers, and hobbyists all around the globe.
I decided to join the Package Team to hopefully spread the knowledge I have gained over the years working in the commercial package space. Having a package available to the public for the last 8 years gives me a great insight into what people want from Umbraco. My hope is that I can help the package ecosystem grow and become more accessible to a wider audience.
I can't wait to get started with the rest of the Package Team and am excited to see how we can help it grow over the next year.
Mario Lopez
I work as a Solutions Architect at Luminary, an agency in Melbourne, Australia. I have been using Umbraco for 6 years and .NET for about 12. Before that I worked in the media industry as motion graphics and 3D designer and modeler.
One of the things I love about Umbraco is the great effort that goes into making it extensible. It's not super complicated, compared with other CMSes, and the great community is always willing to help you with any issues you might face.
Of course, there's always room for improvement and I hope I can contribute a little to make it even better.
I'm author of a couple of packages and I find it pretty rewarding when people use them and contribute to make them better. I have also been awarded the Umbraco MVP a couple of times.
In my non-developer life, I recently got into hobby modeling and I try to (badly) play guitar and video games.
Richard Ockerby
Hi there 👋 My name is Richard and by day I'm a Technical Director at the UK based agency, Drummond Central. By night, after spending time with my amazing family and having the occasional jam on the guitar, I put on my hoody and start hacking at all things technical. I absolutely love all things tech and get particularly enthusiastic when it comes to sharing with like-minded individuals!
Starting with Umbraco back in v7, I've seen first-hand the changes made over the years and the challenges faced by developers. As a huge advocate for the extensibility of Umbraco, I really wanted to get involved to make it easier and more accessible for people to work with packages. Having been a member of the Package Team for a number of years, I'm very proud of the work we've done so far and can't wait to see what we can achieve in the coming year.
Team steward:
Ronald Barendse
I am very much looking forward to working with the new team and seeing how we can help improve the Umbraco package ecosystem together. Ever since I started working with Umbraco, the importance of being able to rely on packages to extend on the core CMS features has been very clear to me. Being part of the Commercial Products team at HQ (mainly working on Forms and Deploy) and experiencing similar challenges as many other package developers, knowing that even the impact of a single improvement can affect multiple people really motivates me.
Although the release cadence of two new major CMS versions each year (since v9 was launched in 2021) has really helped in predictability, stability and standardization, it also poses an additional challenge for package authors in keeping up and/or maintaining multiple versions. With the new back-office coming in v13 and all changes that come with it, it’s especially important to get community feedback and share knowledge as early as possible. I’m certain that the Package Team can play a huge role in this and ensure that together with HQ, we can keep a healthy package ecosystem!
As team steward, I will facilitate our bi-weekly team meetings, as well as help the team with structuring tasks, ideas, events, or other things that we can think of to improve the package ecosystem. In addition, Bolette Kern will help out as ‘assistant steward’ and provide assistance with HQ communication, blog posts, and newsletters, and collect feedback on HQ initiatives on packages/integrations and Marketplace.
Package Awards judging begins
The first, very exciting, task the Package Team will be helping out on will be this year's Package Awards. Originally started by the team as a community initiative, I’m delighted to see this now becoming an official category in the Umbraco Awards! A big goal of our team is to honor, celebrate and promote the many packages that are available, so I’m very pleased to see the number of packages that were submitted.
To help evaluate and score this amazing number of packages, we’re happy to welcome additional judges to the panel! Note that judges will not be eligible to win an award. If you’d like to get involved please email us at packages@umbraco.com 💪
Should you be curious about what else the team could do or help with, you can visit this page and learn more about the team's focus areas, goals, and main activities.
If you have any questions, feedback, or ideas for the team you can post them on the package team issue tracker or reach out to me at packages@umbraco.com.