In the end of April (holy crap, already a month ago!), I attended the Magento developers paradise for a second time. The last one I attended was the one in Mallorca in the summer of 2013. This time, the conference was in a beautiful village at the coast of Croatia – Opatija.
Getting there was not the most comfortable and easiest task, but we managed it with quite some preparation. There were no flights from Frankfurt to Rijeka, the nearest airport. Hence, my flight went to Zagreb, from where it is a nearly two hours ride to Opatija. Although Inchoo helped us with the transfer (thanks Nandino!), it took quite some time to arrange everything. I finally shared the ride with some people from integer_net, Netresearch and Nils from Polo Motorrad – thanks for the nice company!
This year, the conference was all about Magento 2. The main idea was to bring the Magento developer ecosystem nearer to Magento 2. And I think this totally worked out – at least for me. Nearly all talks were about Magento 2 and all hackathon projects were built on top of M2. During the hackathon, we started to implement FireGento_Pdf2 – a Magento 2 port of the popular PDF extension for M1. Christoph from Netresearch and Matthias from code-x joined the PDF project. Christoph started to implement some tests, Matthias started looking into a new rendering engine based on DomPDF and I started to build the main framework for the extension. And that separation worked quite well! At least I learned a lot M2 stuff during the project. But since I mainly learned new stuff, there is not that much to show until now. But at least you can change the rendering engine in the system configuration and if you switch it to „Standard FireGento“, than you see a really awesome hello world PDF 😉 Thanks to Tobias for showing (I should probably say teaching) me some M2 stuff!
After the hackathon on Monday, the next two days were full of talks. Although not every talk is suitable to you, you always learn something new and get new ideas. Thanks to all the speakers! And isn’t it all about networking? This was a big part as well – the parties were legendary each and every night. Everyone got five drink vouchers every night, which helped that the mood was always good…
Inchoo did an amazing job in organising this event. They cared about so much and thought of so many details. For instance, you had a conference plan at the back of your badge. The badge was built in a way that it could not easily flip. You could continue with the hackathon when you did not want to go to the winery. The organisation team had lightning green shirts, so that you could easily recognise them. And so on…! So many thanks to the whole Inchoo team!
The conference was really great, so that I only have two ideas or wishes for the next time:
- It would be cool to have each developers paradise in another country, so that you get to know other countries. Croatia is indeed beautiful and I would be happy to come back, but I simply love to explore new countries.
- A shorter connection from the main airport to the conference location would be great. I think the way from Rijeka to Opatija is short, but Zagreb is of course the main airport with many connections. And two hours transfer by taxi is just too much.
There are already some other reviews, which you may want to check out:
And if you are interested in a more picture-like overview, I am pretty sure you want to check out the official photo album.