It was a humid day with a temperature of 65° F (or around 18 degrees for the rational part of the world) and 88% humidity in Orlando, Florida, on Thursday, March 5th, 2015, when the idea that was Skrift was born. Erica, Janae, and I were all employees of Mindfly, a now-shuttered studio based out of Bellingham, WA. Mindfly had resurrected the notion of an American Umbraco festival the year before, and we were celebrating how successful the second annual event was going.
Erica had helped Umbraco out with training sessions that week, and the enthusiasm from the newest Umbraco community members that she'd trained was at an all time high before Friday's sessions. There had been drinks. There had been karaoke. And because Umbraco founder Niels Hartvig was on the scene, there were Negroni cocktails (🤢) and some truly heinous black licorice candies (🤮).
On the following day I would give a presentation that Niels would tell me was "Almost, but not quite, good." That's typical Danish forthrightness for you. (And probably still a bit too generous.)
It Was A Dark and Stormy Night Cocktail
The Florida conference was uWestFest's sophomore event, and Erica, Janae, and I were huddled around a table in a bar at the Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin, mildly toasted on Moscow mules (the unofficial official cocktail of the American Umbraco community), and debating what we could do to keep the good times rolling and helping make sure that uWestFest 2016 happened. The American Umbraco community was smaller, more hidden, and challenging to dig out of the shadows to get to conferences compared to its European counterpart. Could we improve our presence and keep conversations and awareness going between events?
What we arrived at was a 'community magazine', where we would trick find two authors a month in the Umbraco community to write articles, with topics ranging from technical tutorials to community news. With this, we'd be building out an Umbraco community brand that we could then also use as a megaphone to promote our future uWestFest events.
We also decided to make Skrift (as it would come to be called) a project owned and operated by the three of us, instead of proposing it as a Mindfly-ran operation that would require approval and budget from the company brass.
Mindfly, Interrupted
This proved to be prescient. Three months later, in June 2015, Mindfly was shut down, and the uWestFest brand was moved over to Scandia. We were a magazine without a conference, and a trio of peers and friends who no longer all worked at the same agency.
Whelp.
We chose to keep Skrift going. In part, it was to keep our skin in the game. It was also a good excuse to keep meeting up for weekly Skrift lunches.
(There was a great taco place downtown we'd hit like Indiana Jones hitting a Nazi. Would we have kept going if it hadn't been for Taco Tuesdays? The world may never know.)
Insert Important Tangent Here
In an unrelated tangent that will feed directly back to this narrative (I promise), I was recently interviewed by a college journalist about a LARP (live action role playing game) that I've been running at the local university for the past sixteen years. The interviewer wanted to know: what was the secret to keeping the club running for that many years?
The answer was simple: you keep showing up every week. Especially when it's feeling challenging and you don't want to. And when you're there, you pay attention to the people around you, see where they're having fun and see where they're needing help.
Regularity isn't just good for bowels.
Back to Skrift
People have asked us over the years, how have you kept going after so long? To be fair, I don't think that ten years ago we had considered the fact that Skrift might exist ten years later. But the answer is the same as the LARP: we keep showing up for each other, and when we see someone needing help on the team, we help. Our longevity is more about the stubbornness of insisting on keeping our schedule than about having started with a plan.
We've all experienced burnout before, between the dual responsibilities of our actual careers, other responsibilities, and the running of Skrift. Thankfully, the best part of having a team is the ability for someone to help out and step in when someone else needs a break or an assist. And we've been tremendously lucky to have one another to rely on.
Challenges in a Post-Panini 🥪 World
When asked about the challenges I've faced over the years in my role as the editor, I can say that they've evolved over time. Traditionally, the greatest challenge is when I need to provide editorial feedback and get a writer response close to a deadline. It's always nerve-wracking when, due to a combination of luck or other responsibilities that I find myself close to the deadline and know that if the magazine doesn't go out on time the only person I can blame is myself.
But like all things in this weird post-pandemic world, it's been getting strange. This year I was reviewing an article submission by an Umbracian only to realize what I was reading was what the kids are calling "AI slop". Just in case it wasn't clear, regardless of your views on the various strains of AI technology, we at Skrift aren't quite ready to accept LLMs as authors yet.
(I also regret to inform the shredding-for-gains crypto bros that our articles aren't NFTs either.)
It was surprisingly challenging to put together an email response to the 'author', advising them that I couldn't accept their piece because it was written by an algorithm and not a person. Because (a) it's a weird thing to have to say, and (b) because there's the tiniest voice inside me that worried about what if I was someone wrong and they were merely just a very bad author?
(I was not wrong, thankfully.)
Our Greatest Hits
As part of these retrospectives we're being tasked to write about Skrift I was asked to share what my favorite articles have been. As the editor, this feels a bit unfair. Like asking a parent to choose their favorite children.
(Although, if asked when they're feeling particularly honest, every parent will tell you precisely who their favorite is. Or more importantly, who their least favorite is.)
We've had countless articles with great code tutorials and community calls to action that I could point to. I could make a whole list of lists, as it were.
But I've got three specific ones that come to mind, that touch on a topic that's been top of mind for me for a long time and is especially applicable for me in 2025: burnout.
Like many in our industry, I often find myself flirting with this particular demon. It's a hectic time to be a software engineer. The post-pandemic era has been rife with layoffs, thousands of jobs going away that aren't coming back. CEOs are doing their best to impersonate the robber barons of the 19th century as they look to the novel opportunities of new technology to not better the quality of life of their employees, but instead further disrupt labor. Even when situated in a great organization (as I am) you can feel the pressure coming from the industry's ecosystem at large.
Never mind the background radiation outside work: fascism is back in style, food is pricier than ever, and I now know more about tariffs than I ever wanted.
2025 is a lot.
There's a consolation and guidance to be found, then, in these articles about the topic.
In March 2018, in what my brother likes to call "the before times", Tim Payne wrote Countdown to Burnout, where he discussed his own experiences with it and gave advice on those suffering on how to recover.
My fellow Skriftian Erica touched on the topic in June 2020 with How to Cope with Motivation Withdrawal. The word "burnout" is used only once, but anyone who's survived burnout can see how tightly motivation withdrawal coincides with it. One of my favorite lines is her imploring us to "[B]e compassionate to your current and future self".
And lastly, Janae talks to us mid-burnout in Burning Out at Both Ends, which sounds like my experiences when I've been too enthusiastic with extremely fiery hot sauce 🥵🪭 but instead discusses the dangerous relationship between passion and work. They say if you love what you do for a living, you'll never work a day in our life. Janae says what we're all thinking: often its the passion that drives us into that dangerous landscape of burnout in the first place.
They're all good pieces, and even more relevant today than when they first came out. I recommend giving them a read.
Ten Down, Ten (or More) To Go?
Ten years. Part of me can't believe it's been that long. Another part of me envies how much younger that Kyle was when we were sitting in that hotel bar, and how little he realized that the ideas being discussed there would lead to a major part of his life for the years to follow.
Do we have ten years ahead of us? I think so. Firstly, as mentioned before, I can be stubborn. Secondly, there's a joy that comes from being part of the Umbraco community and having a helping hand in making it a more welcome and participatory space.
Here in Bellingham we're well past the dreary winter and the air is warm in mid-spring. Which means it's time to start looking forward to that yearly pilgrimage to the bosom of the Umbraco homelands: Odense. Any time I feel exhausted and am looking to be reenergized in the world of Umbraco, I know that CodeGarden will be the cure as I meet friends from over a decade of working in Umbraco, and new friends I make while I'm there.
I hope I'll see you there. But if not, you can find us here. Every month. Just like the last decade.
Maybe you’ll even write for us. 😉