I posted on Twitter that I want to start blogging, but that took a while to actually happen, so…

use Germany\LongEasterWeekend;

…I finally found time and inspiration to do it.

Prologue

I wanted to attend the Mage UnConference ever since it started to happen in March 2015 in Berlin. At that time my move to Germany was undergoing and with a contract starting in April that would mean separate visa/expenses. Next one in March 2016 I missed because the plan was to go to Meet Magento Czech Republic in Prague end of the month (I won a ticket). For the Mage UnConf Netherlands I was simply too late to grab a ticket and actually let my friend Tsvetan Stoychev to buy the last one. So in 2017 I said - enough is enough, I have to experience it. At that time I had some financial difficulties and I’m very grateful to FireGento organization for sponsoring my hotel room

My trip to Cologne started not so well, I got a bit sick the day before and the flight was cancelled so I almost missed pre-party literally jumping into the S-Bahn from Airport to the city

First Day

The first talk I attended was “Future of Magento” where we discussed different perspectives of using Magento 1 but mostly Magento 2, migrations, learning the new platform and frameworks it uses. From Magento product team we had Max Yekaterynenko and Oleksii Korshenko. The conversation turned to be very interesting

The second one for me was “Magento 2 APIs” which was very interesting insight of the API and real-project experience of consuming it as well as customizing. Several usage problems were also raised. Shortly before ending of the time slot I joined “Git Cheat Sheet” talk to tell a bit how to sign git commits, more about it in this tweet

Third talk of the day was “Community Engineering Magento” by Max Yekaterynenko, where we were told more about community PR Team, community Gate Keepers and general contribution process

Last talk was “When to overarchitecture” by David Manners which kept tired folks entertained :)

Second Day

Started with “Using Docker at Prod/Stage” by Dima from Kharkiv, Ukraine

Next talk I attended was “Learning TDD with Katas” by Fabian Schmengler which raised a great discussion about testing, DI and best practices

The third was “How contribute to Magento 2” which marked a milestone of me attending all three talks led by Magento employees :) Here we talked about the Magento 2 contribution process in detail

Last talk of the day (and conference) was “Magento 2 Deployment” by Marcel, Peter Jaap, Matthias where several deployment tools were introduced/discussed

Epilogue

Note that I did not describe the pre- and after-parties as I couldn’t enjoy them in full due to my sickness. But rest assured - they were great as well :)

After checking out of the Motel One Walter offered me and Matthias to rent a car via car2go which turned into a very nice small road trip. My flight home was cancelled, rescheduled and delayed again so I got home pretty late and tired nevertheless happy of meeting new people, catching up with old friends and all the knowledge and inspiration. Thanks for reading and till the next UnConference!

Blog by Alexander Turiak, Technical Architect at Magento (an Adobe company) Professional Services Follow him on Twitter