We are happy to be able to run the calendar and each year we become better at organising and running it. After all it's 100% non-profit and volunteer work, which we love to do. This year we have had a much more quiet December since a lot of the articles were finished before December 1st so we did not experience the "What's on for tomorrow? Do we have something for tomorrow at all?" stress this year, which have been really nice since December is stressful enough with all the other Christmas preparations going on outside of Umbraco land.

But now that we're at the end of it we need a break from organising and refuel for next year. We have been at it since the start of September and it takes quite some time to reach out to potential new writers and convince them that they have some awesomeness to offer the rest of the community. But it's worth all the effort and this year we have had 25 new writers out of 28 who have never written a post for us before. We are very happy about this since we want to make sure to showcase the diversity of the community and be as inclusive as possible.

We could not have done this without some help from some of the community members that we already know who helped us to reach out to members that we did not know or have had the chance to meet in person ourselves yet or people we knew but did not have any contact information on.

So a big thanks and #h5yr to our elves who helped us behind the scenes to assemble this years writers line-up.

• ​Dave Woestenborghs​
• Dennis Adolfi
• Carole Rennie Logan
• Lucy Brailsford
• Marcin Zajkowski 

The diversity is also reflected in the articles that range from hardcore tech stuff to lifestyle articles. We nearly always have a mix of this though but this year it has been a bit more.

Preparations for the 2018 edition of the calendar has not started yet but if you already know by now that you might be interested then please don't hesitate to let us know. And please do have a chat with us if you see any of us at a meetup or at Codegarden somewhere. The sooner we know the better since we can prepare even better.

Apart from the work of finding writers, project manage etc. we of course also spend time on improving the editor experience in Umbraco and of course the frontend. This year we have made it possible to embed CodePens inside the editor. Thank you to Mike Masey for suggesting that feature. Also, we're working on implementing a service worker so we can make the articles available offline, which is useful if you commute to work and suffer from li-fi or don't even have internet on the commute at all for instance. It's still work in progress but hopefully we will launch it during 2018. So there is a little something to look forward to so stay tuned.

With all of that said all there is left is to say:

Thank you for reading and supporting the calendar with all the retweets, quotes and mentions on social media - and of course a special thank you to all of the writers for taking the time to participate this year you have been an absolute bliss to work with!

Happy holidays and merry xmas!

Dave, Chriztian and Jan