Why did we go all the way to Cracow?

Our company, represented by Lukasz Linczewski and Marcin Frymark, took part in Meet Magento 2017 #MMPL17 in Cracow. It’s been 3 years since our last visit at a Meet Magento conference. Despite the considerable distance from our Gdynia command center, we felt that the upcoming release of Magento 2.2.0 was enough reason and motivation to buy Pendolino tickets and go to Cracow. The acquisition of a new client, who wanted to build its store on the new Magento platform, also did matter.


First impressions

We remembered well the last Meet Magento Poland in which we partook in 2014 in Warsaw and we were not expecting to get a lot out of the conference. But right from the start we were pleasantly surprised. The conference was organized in Stara Zajezdnia in Cracow. It’s a beautiful place, lots of open space, enormous hall with a huge stage. It looked really professional. It was clear that Kuba Zwoliński with the SnowDog crew took care of the smallest details.

The conference was traditionally kicked off by the energetic Ben Marks, who talked about the future of the Magento platform.


Comparison with Meet Magento Poland 2014

I would like to tell You briefly about how Meet Magento 2017 compared to Meet Magento 2014. The 2014 conference was an exhibition window for Polish companies that showed what projects they had built without focusing on the details of their implementations. We were under the impression that the conference was attended by companies competing with each other on the market and not too keen to share their solutions, ideas, etc. Very scarce were the people working closely with Magento. Except for Ben Marks, we did not recognize anyone.

This year it was totally different! The OpenSource conference atmosphere was very perceptible. There were many developers from all over Poland who were able to talk freely about many topics related to Magento 2. High five for Pawel Cieślak, Maciek Lewkowicz, Michał Osaka and Liudas Stanevicius.

The place, as I wrote, was beautiful. Here’s a list of some attractions:

  • Huge main room
  • 2 additional rooms for technical and business lectures
  • Accenture-sponsored relaxation zone
  • Bar (very important for us :))
  • Large space with seating, sun loungers, etc.

Contribution day

The official conference took place on Monday and Tuesday. However, we arrived in Cracow on Saturday evening, so we can go to the Bold office on the morning of the Contribution Day. We were very curious to meet the people who are directly responsible for the development of the open part of Magento 2 - and we were not disappointed. Max Yekaterynenko (Director of Software Development) was there, along with two developers who helped us understand how to participate in Magento 2 development by fixing bug reports.

At this point we have to brag that on Sunday we managed to write 2 bugfixes that were merged into the Magento repository:


Interesting Lectures

Since we are developers, we obviously spent most of our time in the technical room. Here’s a list of a few lectures worth mentioning:

  • Anna Völkl on security in Magento 1 and Magento 2. @rescueAnn
  • Riccardo Tempesta and his module make it easy to work with Magento2 @RicTempesta
  • Juan Alonso on Process Automation @Jalogut

However, the best lecture, without any doubts, turned out to be funny and at the same time conveying a lot of knowledge, a lecture by Anton Kril @AntonKril . If you are not following this guy on Twitter, it’s really worth it. Anton reminded us of the elementary knowledge that escapes us during our daily work. He pointed out that if you want to achieve something it is only possible through hard work and a huge amount of learning.
Anton’s lecture got us super motivated and this motivation persists to this day.


Summary

It is easy to deduce from this post that we are very pleased with the conference. It gave us a lot of motivation, a huge amount of ideas for changes in our company and an enormous desire to learn. We'll be back next year!