Many people had been eagerly awaiting this day. Finally, another larger Magento community event in person in Germany. At netz98, too, we were really looking forward to this event. Internally, we felt we needed to step up our support this year. So this year we even had 7 participants at the event. If colleagues had not fallen ill, the group would have been even larger.
The Mainz colleagues set off on Friday. Unfortunately, the journey was a little more stressful this time thanks to the heavy traffic in the Rhine-Main region. In the end, though, we arrived safely in Cologne. The Cologne Marathon was also taking place that weekend. An event with several thousand participants. That meant I had to move my car the following day, otherwise I would no longer have been able to get out of the hotel's underground car park.
Friday - Pre-Party
The Unconference always starts with the PreParty. As last time, it took place at Lokal Alte Feuerwache. The venue is already familiar to the Magento community. What was new compared with the 2019 event was that you needed proof of a COVID test. It could be no more than 24 hours old. On Friday, that turned out to be a little more stressful than expected.
Since our car journey had taken a little longer, the listed testing centers had unfortunately already closed. After a little tour of central Cologne, however, we managed to find a testing center that was still open.
We then arrived at the pre-party a little late. It was the joyful reunion we had expected, helped along by chilled drinks.
Day 1 - Saturday
On Saturday, we headed to Tor 28. On arrival, you had to show your test certificate and received a wristband as a reward (there was a wristband in a different color for the next day). This ensured everyone had been tested.
As always, the event started with a welcome to the participants, introductions of the sponsors, farewells to organizing team members, and a general explanation of how things would work.
Rico and Fabian were wearing eye-catching Magento-orange suits. That was quite a statement right on the first day!
Once the topics had been introduced, the schedule for the first day was set.
So off we went to the first session...
... which I promptly missed, thanks to a lovely conversation with Carmen. But that is how it is at the Unconference. It is not just the talks that count, but above all the personal encounters we had sorely missed because of COVID.
Magento 2 Indexer
After that, it was straight into my own session on Magento 2 indexers (indexes, indexing, ...). I think a few people were able to learn something more about indexing in Magento. While preparing it, I also found quite a few things I had not known before.
Here are the slides:
The topic was really only for backend developers. I certainly had an effect on David Lambauer's son. By the end, he was fast asleep.
Middleware with n8n
Tobias Niebergall showed how he had moved internal processes at e3n to the low-code middleware n8n. Nodes can be grouped neatly in it, and there are lots of ready-made integrations with cloud services.
A Magento 2 integration is also possible. Here, it makes sense to use webhooks in Magento. This does not work out of the box, but it does with the third-party module MageHook by Willem Poortmann.
Reviving the Magento Community
The discussion about the state of the Magento community was moderated by Sonja Franz and started with a question about whether people would judge the current situation to be better than in 2019 (the year of the last Unconference). Nobody thought it was better. Andreas von Studnitz pointed out, however, that it was better than in 2021 because there were events again now.
Much of the discussion revolved around finding relevant information about Magento and how to make the system more appealing to others. Willem Wigman wants "more fun with Magento".
The fact that magento.com does not lead to the open-source version but to the Adobe Commerce version was also a topic again.
Another open question was whether the central place should be the Magento Association or whether people leaned more toward the Mage-OS website.
David Lambauer used the Laravel community as an example to show what something like this could look like. David is also the author of an Awesome Magento List on Github.
Events are always a topic, too. For years, Simon Sprankel has maintained a Google calendar (named "Magento Events") with all the major events related to the Magento community. This calendar would also be something for the central site. In general, a good "Getting Started" section is missing.
Overall, though, the community wants to work on complaining less and focusing more on highlighting positive things as well. That is also something I want to work on myself.
How else are we supposed to get new people excited about the system if we only go on about things we do not like?
Aftershow Party
The aftershow party took place at the Rheinterrassen on the other bank of the Rhine.
Since I had to move my car because of the Cologne Marathon, I set off on foot to the other side of the Rhine.
Here are a few impressions from the walk.
As the name suggests, the Rheinterrassen offers a great view of the Rhine. Alongside the lovely view, there was also excellent (vegan) food in a stylish setting.
The vegan sashimi has stayed in my memory. It came surprisingly close to real sashimi. So I went back for seconds.
Day 2 - Sunday
The last day began with a bit of "attrition". Unfortunately, there were far fewer attendees than the day before. That is always the case, but this time it seemed a little more extreme to me. Was it because of the late nights? Nobody knows for sure. A pity that this meant so much food had to be "rescued".
Talks that had not made it the previous day now got their chance.
Hyvä / Commerce Coverage / Compat Modules
Torben Höhn led a discussion on Hyvä. One major topic is the coverage of Adobe Commerce features in Hyvä. The issue turned out to be not quite so easy to solve because only a few people are helping with the porting. Torben himself has already ported quite a few things with his team at basecom and was able to give us some insight.
I tried to explain how agencies like netz98 approach estimation and risk assessment.
It is certainly easier when at least part of the porting is priced into a client project. But that is not always so easy, which is why decision-makers end up waiting until somebody else has already ported something. That leaves you with the classic chicken-and-egg problem.
The discussion was actually also supposed to provide an overview of the features already available, but we somewhat neglected that in the heat of the discussion.
Black Stories
Bernhard Leers wanted to try out whether Black Stories (crime mystery guessing games) could help people put themselves in the shoes of someone facing Magento errors.
I was skeptical about whether that would work. In the end, though, it was great fun to work as a team to guess the various bugs and error situations described. Questions could only be answered with yes or no. Some of the errors were very bizarre. I think we will certainly do this again at a Magento meetup. The whole thing is wonderfully interactive.
Developer Skill Matrix
I found Fabian Schmengler's insights interesting. He explained how, at integer_net, he is trying to make salaries and career levels more transparent with a developer skill matrix. Fabian gave us insight into how the whole thing came about and how the team was involved. The CircleCI Engineering Competency Matrix and tools such as Leapsome or muchskills were also mentioned.
During the discussion, we also got an insight into how this had been introduced at maxcluster, a hosting provider (rather than an agency).
I am also working on a matrix like this myself. In my case, however, the focus is on knowing which colleagues cover which technologies.
Related to a skill matrix is the TechRadar, which maxcluster also makes publicly available.
Prismic CMS
Jeroen Boersma from elgentos demonstrated the integration of the Prismic CMS into a Magento 2 instance. The integration was done in a live-coding style. Not everything always works straight away in that setting. But that is exactly what people love. Authentic exchange on a technical level.
The Magento integration uses a module that elgentos provides free of charge on Github.
https://github.com/elgentos/magento2-prismicio
Other Sessions
Since several sessions ran in parallel, I unfortunately missed quite a few things as well.
There was, for example, a talk by my colleague Maria Kern and Christian Staß, who presented a CSS integration of Tailwind into the standard Magento checkout (I hope I have described that correctly).
The discussion around Mage-OS attracted a lot of interest. Mage-OS was certainly also the topic that sparked controversy, as it is closely connected to Adobe's community work.
My colleague Jens Richter was also able to contribute some of his experiences. Overall, then, a successful event.
I am particularly pleased that some younger participants were also so actively involved. That is very important so that it is not always the same old faces up front shaping opinion. I deliberately include myself in that.
Conclusion
There were also a few people I missed. They were absent because of illness or personal commitments. Perhaps we will meet again at a Magento meetup. Overall, though, it was a great "class reunion".
The children also had their big moment at the end. Thanks to the childcare team, a performance had been rehearsed and put on. So young and old alike contributed to the event's success.
Many thanks also to everyone who organized and supported the event. There is always a lot happening in the background that goes unseen. Thank you for that. As always, it was great fun and we felt very welcome.
If I have forgotten anyone in this post, please forgive me. There were so many impressions for me, too, that I cannot put them all into words here.
To finish, a few selfies ... from the world's worst photographer. According to my wife :-)
