by Anton
25. June 2013 15:23
As you already know from reading older blog posts, Oliver and I attended the European Orchard Harvest in Amsterdam two weeks ago. In short – it was worth the trip and the time. Probably we will attend the next Orchard conference in Europe.
Learning
We learned quite a few things at the conference. We just upgraded our discoverize portal software from version 1.3 to version 1.6 of Orchard. Many topics in the presentations were to a great extend new to us, like Tokens, Projections, Fields, Caching, Taxonomy, Recipes, Shapes, Workflow. It was also interesting to hear about the road map for Orchard and the coming version 1.7. There is no German site for the Orchard project – maybe we should create one…
Meeting
It was awesome to talk to other people who use Orchard for their products. Before the Harvest event we did not know anybody personally. It was inspiring to hear about different approaches in sessions and informal talks, like performance tuning in applications, working with Orchard, deployment processes. There were two fractions of Orchard users: many use it solely as a framework upon which they build their own software – like we do, others use it to build web sites, e-commerce platforms for customers.
Organisation
Ylan Kunstler did a great job organzing the conference. The sessions were mostly on time. He did a great job of introducing the speakers, taking questions from the audience and bridging the gaps. The venue (Tobacco theater) was also very nice – good choice. The fee for the conference (120 Euros per person) was very reasonable. Also thanks to the sponsors we did not have to pay such large fees like other conference take.
Amsterdam
Amsterdam is a beautiful city – it was the first time I visited it. Good choice for the conference. The centre is composed predominantly of narrow houses and many canals. I took one day to explore the city. I can recommend the boat tours – it is nice to see city from the canals.