What Exactly is UMCO?

09 Jan 2018 / By Matt Brailsford / 0 Comments

When Lee Kelleher and I started UMCO back in 2016 there was a lot of wonder as to what we were actually up to. Were we going to be joining as a killer agency? Were we going to be starting a package development company? Well, the answer is really much less formal.

Pre UMCO

Back in 2016 both Lee and I had been working quite a lot together on open source packages and found that working together we were able to manage things much better. At the same time we noticed a pattern that whoever released the package in question tended to be the one person that got asked all the questions and was essentially the go to person for that package, which we wanted to try and avoid.

- Photo by Douglas Robar, Percipient Studios

Post UMCO

Our answer to that was to simply come up with a name for our collaborations under which we would house all our GitHub repositories and other releated accounts. Now whenever we get support requests people see us as a pair and it's made it much easier to distribute the workload. In addition, it's also given us a home to do other Umbraco projects we've really wanted to do, such as CODECABIN, and has also started to become a symbol of our dedication to a project giving users confidence that they will be supported.

We both still run our own seperate companies, but for anything open source Umbraco, UMCO is where we come together.

Support UMCO

Another benefit to the UMCO brand is that it's helped us to formalise a support strategy for our projects. As you can imagine, maintaining the various projects we do in our spare time can be quite demanding so to help with this we have created a Patreon page to allow people to back us finanically. We absolutely want to keep all our Umbraco packages/projects open source and free, but Patreon allows agencies who benefit from our projects to give back to their maintenance.

If you are an agency using and UMCO package, please do consider backing us as it really does help keep the lights on and maintain the quality that people have come to expect from us.