On September 19-20, the Meet Magento Feast took place in Poznań, Poland; and let’s be clear - the word “feast” is absolutely applicable here, since it’s simply unacceptable to call such a great event with a boring word “conference”.
It had a high start, and by “high start” we mean over 4000 m above the Earth’s surface, where Magento developers, ex-Magento developers, Magento creators and Magento adepts for a whole minute joined in a free fall.. a fantastic feeling that can be experienced during a short period of time until your parachute has not opened yet and your body accelerates gradually.
The sky is not the limit for Magento! ;)
But let’s come back to the sinful earth where things got no less exciting. Traditionally, Meet Magento gets started with the speech of Ben Marks, who is known as the Magento world prophet, but unlike vague weather service forecasts his predictions always true! And guess what.. this time was no exception! Ben expects the rise of Magento 2 adoptions and since he was probably really inspired by skydiving, he also predicted cloud area development for Magento. It makes sense, especially in case of Magento Enterprise Cloud usage because SaaS eCommerce platform-competitors have been highlighting this advantage for quite a while.
Kuba Zwoliński and Bartek Kwiatkowski were talking about Internet of Things and Magento.
Due to Milan Stojanov from eCommistry we learned about shifting Magento 1.x extensions to Magento 2. His conclusions regarding Magento 1 developers switching to Magento 2 were as follows:
- Magento 2 is a huge step forward
- No one should be scared of switching to Magento 2
- It’s better to use code migration tool as a starting point
- It’s better not to use Object Manager
- Constructions should be clean
- Practice Interface driven design.
Nils Preuß from Polo Motorrad & Sportswear GmbH offered using Solr for things other than just site Search and this recommendation came both from his personal preferences and opinions of his colleagues’ with Solr experience.
Sherrie Rohde from Magento, Inc. brought up some ideas on how to get involved into the Magento Community and she really knows what she is talking about, as statistics from her presentation are really impressing! In 2015 Magento community created over 2500 pull requests, 2, 500 talks on Magento events, 130 podcasts about Magento, meetups and conferences in over 20 countries and published 3 books dedicated to one and only.. Magento.
Sherrie offered to focus on thought leadership instead of shameless self promotion at your website and provide the best answers for customers on your blog, Magento forum, StackExchange, GitHub, apart outright advertisement. Joining Magento community events and sharing prominent ideas with your audience is definitely going to pay off as well. It may be a big deal if you’ve never practiced public speaking before but it shouldn’t stop you if you have experience worth sharing. To gain more confidence, Sherrie has also mentioned her book discovery, also known as loud a New York times bestseller: TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking, authored by Chris Anderson, curator of TED.
Alternatively, if just a thought about some sort of lightning talk or full public speech scares you to death, you may use other ways to get involved in the Magento communit: create, publish and share podcasts and videos, cookbooks, whitepapers.
Vinai Kopp from Magento, Inc. dedicated his speech to writing testable code and he literally begged everyone not to use PHPStorm and test Magento 2 code with your own tests, since it is a better practice..least to say.
Ivan Chepurnyi from EcomDev (Challenges of Architecting Magento 2.0 Customizations) recommended using dependency injections and substituting Magento customization implementations.
Sergey Lysak from Eltrino was unveiling SEO Lucky Chances. He was sharing general SEO trends and useful tips for eCommerce and highlighted SEO opportunities available in Magento 2.
The second day of Meet Magento PL 2016 was packed with a lot of fun and helpful workshops and case studies.
Miguel Balparda from Nexcess highlighted the best practices of Magento 2.0 performance optimization.
Magento 2 performance was a burning issues of this event and one more speakerm Igor Bondarenko from Neklo LLC, was also exploring this topic in his practical case study. E-commerce Marketing Automation. How to Sell More and Save Face by Michał Leszczyński from GetResponse was around advantages of mailing campaigns.
The marketing tips flow got continued by Maciej Wicenciak from Bluerank with a loud stating that “Content is Still a King” and by Alexander Kitov (Perpetto) with presentation dedicated to Customer Lifetime Value.
During the second day the most expected speakers on Meet Magento stage were Anton Krill and Ben Marks. Anton was talking about Technical direction of Magento 2, explained why it’s better to avoid ordinary MVC apart from implementing architectural changes using CQRS pattern. Ben within mini BarCamp Ask me anything was asked about extension validation for new Magento Marketplace and Magento 2 certification. Unfortunately, developers still can’t be checked and certified with Magento 2 skills but Magento team is hardly working on these tests so it seems that soon they will be available for Magento developers.
We are never tired to give kudos to organizers of such an incredible event: Marta, Kuba and the amazing Snowdog team, thank you!
P.S. Tattos will remind about great time spent with you:) P.P.S. Hope we are going to make skydiving our annual tradition!
