As a participant in the 44th Magento Stammtisch Rhein-Main, you could experience an afternoon and evening full of exciting discussions, new insights, and excellent company. With over 30 participants from various areas such as product management, frontend and backend development, marketing, and sales, it was a day that was both informative and entertaining.
For me, the day began with an AI hackathon at netz98. Several colleagues from netz98 were there, and it was a great opportunity to exchange ideas and learn about the latest developments in artificial intelligence.
Summery Atmosphere and Barbecue
Before the meetup officially began, we had organized a barbecue. Everyone was in a cheerful summer mood, and it was the perfect start to the rest of the day. It was a great opportunity to talk in a relaxed atmosphere and make new contacts.
Varied Topics and Exciting Talks
The meetup offered a good mix of topics, with some frontend topics taking center stage this time. There were three sessions, all of which were very informative and insightful.
Jan Ahlers from maxcluster spoke about the exciting and timely topic "Performance in Green". He emphasized that sustainability is becoming increasingly important in hosting as well, and that customers are asking for it more and more. One interesting aspect he highlighted was that CPUs consume a lot of electricity and that energy can be saved by reducing the load on the CPU and using more RAM, for example by using Varnish or Redis.
The meetup participants had several questions for Jan.
It was interesting to hear how hosting providers deal with the waste heat from their data centers, and what kinds of things they test to save energy.
Successful Introduction of the Hyvä Theme
A central part of the 44th Magento Stammtisch Rhein-Main was the presentations about the Hyvä Theme. This innovative frontend theme for Magento has attracted a lot of attention in the community, and the two case studies presented impressively demonstrated how successful introducing Hyvä can be.
Tom Muir and Thomas Hausschild from e3n presented their experiences relaunching the designer furniture online shop livim.de based on Hyvä. They started with Hyvä 1.1 and then ported it to Hyvä 1.2. One major highlight was the development of a new product configurator with "Bundles in Bundles" based on AlpineJS, and the lessons learned from it.
They provided valuable insights into the iterative screen design process at e3n and showed the possibilities that Hyvä opens up. They emphasized that the existing data structures were fixed and could not be touched, which posed an additional challenge.
In the end, the shop operator was delighted with a tremendous increase in conversion rate, which might be attributable not only to the improved performance but also to the enhanced product configurator.
Jens Richter and Hanna Winkler from netz98 presented the Hyvä reference project mey.com. Mey is a well-known textile manufacturer, and the challenges in this project were varied.
There were many images in different resolutions and more than 100 Magento modules, almost all of which were custom code. When porting to Hyvä, the codebase was examined again and features that were not needed were removed straight away. This resulted in a development time of about four months. Here, too, the port to Hyvä was successful and produced impressive results. Exact metrics will not be available for a few weeks yet, however. They will certainly be very positive, though.
Both reference projects showed that Magento can be very fast with the Hyvä Theme and emphasized that every project is unique and that projects cannot simply be compared, because their starting conditions (existing data, budgets, teams, ...) are very different. These presentations enriched the evening and offered participants valuable insights and lessons learned.
Conclusion
The 44th Magento Stammtisch Rhein-Main was a complete success. It was a day full of learning, exchange, and good spirits. It was inspiring to see different companies and individuals come together to share knowledge and learn from one another. We are already looking forward to the next meetup.
The next meetup will take place on our colleagues' rooftop terrace at e3n.
