New Hire at Umbraco HQ: Our Man Andy

Hi everyone, I’m Andy Butland and have recently joined the D-Team at Umbraco HQ, where I’ll work primarily on the commercial packages, Forms and Deploy. Until recently, I was employed at the digital agency Zone, who are a long-time Umbraco Gold partner, and as such I’ve been working with the CMS and participating within the community for many years.

My journey to remote work

Originally from Cornwall in the United Kingdom, I spent many years living in London. I’m now based in Italy, where I moved with my family about nine years ago.  We live in a town called Bassano del Grappa, and I have a home office near the famous old wooden bridge with a nice view out over the river.

I’ve got quite used to the remote working setup, and so when I heard Umbraco was expanding recruitment to those living outside of Denmark, I was tempted to throw my hat in the ring… and a couple of months later, here I am.

My involvement with Umbraco

Looking back over my T-shirt collection, it seems I got involved with Umbraco as more than just a developer using the product around 2012. Then, having got my feet wet with open-source contributing to the aborted Umbraco 5 version on Codeplex, I decided to stick around and over the years have made quite a number of code contributions.

I’ve also had a hand in a few features including user groups, fallback languages, list views, password reset, and, not to forget of course, the award-winning and sadly missed “change document type” feature.

In addition to community contributions, I’ve spoken a couple of times at Codegarden as well as at meet-ups in London, released some packages, and written on Umbraco topics for publications like Skrift and my own blog.

Most recently I’ve been learning and contributing as part of the .NET Core (or “Unicore”) team, working to rebuild the CMS to work cross-platform on the latest Microsoft framework.  

When I’m away from my laptop...

Living where I do in Italy, I couldn’t really avoid buying a mint-green Bianchi and taking up cycling as my main mode of exercise. I live just at the point where the flat Veneto plains turn into mountains that lead into the Dolomites. Monte Grappa is the famous one nearby, regularly visited at the summit by the Giro d’Italia - and, just the once, by me (so far, at least).

I also like playing music and have plucked my bass in various bands over the years, from indie-dives in my twenties through to blues and soul in my forties. I’m “between bands” at the moment and on the look-out for something new, so other than a couple of lock-down recordings, I’m perhaps getting a little rusty.  Fortunately there’s only 4 strings, so it won’t take long to pick it up again.

What’s next?

At the time of writing, April 2021, I’m three weeks into the job at Umbraco, enjoying the new challenge and looking forward to meeting my new colleagues in person in the hopefully not-too-distant future.