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Orchard Harvest 2024 was a great experience.
I've never been to a technology conference before, and although Orchard Harvest is a relatively small conference compared to other open source projects, it is by no means a small experience.
This year's Orchard Harvest was the first in-person event in several years. With a few dozen attendees, the conference is small by comparison to other major opensource projects.
Nonetheless, the people there, including core maintainers, business owners, public sector users, and other Orchard Core enthusiasts, brought with them incredible passion surrounding the small but mighty content management system (CMS) and application framework.
I found Orchard Core a couple years ago while researching the best way add mutlti-tenancy to my client's custom software reporting system.
I quickly realized the immense value Orchard Core offers out of the box in terms of features.
You get user management, content management, authentication/authorizations, workflow management, and of course multi-tenancy (plus many, many other features!)
Even more valuable is the ability for Orchard Core to be added to an existing ASP.NET MVC (or Razor Pages) web project simply by referencing a single nuget package.
Lastly, the open source GitHub repository for Orchard Core illustrated the active engagement of a passionate community of developers and users.
I read all the documentation I could on Orchard Core, watched all the YouTube tutorial videos I found (thank you Lombiq!) and set out to do something I'd never done before.
I set out to get involved and contribute to an open source project.
The experience was daunting.
I've developed .NET software systems for over 20 years, almost as long as .NET has been around.
My programming confidence was always high when engaging within my own teams on private projects.
But open source was different.
I would be submitting code that the whole world would see. And I was scared that I might embarass myself.
It took a long time to submit my first pull request. My imposter syndrome was strong, but after several month I garnered enough courage to submit my first PR for Orchard Core.
And I'm glad I did.
I learned a lot about the process to get your PR approved. The need to iterate on the changes, and the necessity to keep your PR branch in sync and up to date with the target branch.
The Orchard Core community was very welcoming and provided constructive feedback.
The experience was very rewarding. Enough so that I was more than happy to hop on a plane and join the community at Orchard Harvest 2024.
I'll continue contributing to the Orchard Core project where I can.
I personally think it is a wonderfully useful technology for any .NET developer out there.
Even if you don't plan to use Orchard Core CMS or application framework in your project, you should at least explore the code to get an idea of how ASP.NET can be used.
In the words of one of the core maintainers for Orchard Core, the code is beautiful.
If you found value in this post, consider following me on X @davidpuplava for more valuable information about Game Dev, OrchardCore, C#/.NET and other topics.