If I can summarize in one word what is my main field of expertise I would say CMS: since I started working in 1996 I always built public websites based on CMS.

When working with Esperia, around year 2000, I developed our internal CMS, which was used to power lots of very popular websites with lots of traffic (at least for the time), like all the top Italian soccer teams, winter sport and soccer portals.

At the time, around 2003-2006, I was also using DotNetNuke to develop some sites for small businesses. It was ok for simple sites, but customizing and making a site look like the designer envisioned was almost impossible.

Then in 2006 I stopped working professionally with CMS as I worked almost one year building emailing apps in New Zealand and then other 2 years and half doing ”IT Consultancy” in Avanade. But as side I was still working on a smaller CMS, the once famous Subtext Blogging engine, which still powers this blog.

Then, a few months after my ASP.NET MVC v1 book was released, I received an email from Niels Hartvig (CEO of Umbraco) asking me if I could go to Copenhagen and give him and the core team a quick start on ASP.NET MVC because they want to rebuild it using ASP.NET MVC. At that point I had never used Umbraco before, but just evaluated it a bit some years before.

Obviously I said yes, I went there, delivered the course and immediately felt like I knew these guys since ever. Also I was fascinated by how they were working with the community to bring an edge to the product.

I immediately became engaged with the community, and gave two talks at CodeGarden 10 about ASP.NET MVC.

Accidentally, as soon as I started my new job after moving to Belgium, I was surprised that Umbraco was used for one of the main public sites of the organization I joined. So I also start working professionally with it.

Unfortunately I couldn’t always work with it, as my job requires me to juggle many different hats and various projects, but nevertheless I stayed involved into the community as much as I could, and I attended various conferences of the Belgian Umbraco User Group (or BUUG) and went again to two other CodeGarden, in 2014 and 2015.

Then the Big Bang happened… and a new project came by. For the next years, Umbraco will be the main product I’ll be working with as we’ll be rebuilding all our online presence using this amazing CMS, and most of the things we’ll customize will be given back to the community, both as packages and PR to the Core.

At first, coming from my background of “purist” .NET developer, I didn’t like too much the mixed approach that required developer to configure the system using the backoffice as it prevented a proper code versioning and Ci to happen. But with the help of the great people in the community I solved most of the issues. And now, with Umbraco 7.4, almost all these issues are solved, thanks to strongly typed models and some tools that help with the versioning of stuff that is still configured in the backoffice.

Now that I’ll be working full-time on Umbraco expect to see something more coming out of me in the Umbraco community and conferences in the future. And if you missed it, I also just had a talk about ASP.NET Core at CodeGarden 16 (slides and demo are available).

And hopefully soon I’ll be moving my blog from this totally dead Subtext to Articulate on Umbraco.

#h5yr