Meet Magento Germany 2016 Review

Better late than never. Finally, here is my review for the #mm16de – the Meet Magento Germany 2016. As always, it was a great event and definitely worth participating. So if you did not go this year, go there next year! It is definitely a must-event for anyone in the German Magento ecosystem. Period.

Unfortunately, I missed the great FireGento hackathon again. My friends kept telling me that it is a bad idea to miss oneself’s bachelor party. Damn it. Weird guys. But anyway, I still managed to come to the pre-party in a reasonable condition – a fact many of my friends doubted. The pre-party was in the Spizz again, but was overshadowed by the football game. A football game is not the most communicative thing on earth. And to my surprise, the people left quite early after the football game. Probably they all feared the big party the next night 😉

The conference itself was at a new venue. The pentahotel is a stylish hotel near the train station and well suited for the event. It was great to have all specialty coffee like milk coffee or cappuccino the whole day. The only disadvantage of the new location was the lunch. They did not manage to serve enough food in a short enough time, so one could easily spent half an hour waiting in the line. Eating pasta both days was also not the best thing ever.

Nevertheless, it is of course not the food which makes a conference great, but the people and the talks. Not every talk is awesome and not every topic is interesting for everyone, but on average, I liked the talks a lot. Especially the ones covering Magento security and coding best practices.
I only disliked the political keynote. Maybe I got him wrong, but the speaker gave many questionable statements, which brought him clearly into one direction of the political spectrum.

I spent one slot in the conference room and not in the developer room in order to hear the fuckup nights, which was rather interesting. Respect to Thomas Goletz for expressing so clear that the Netresearch App Factory has failed completely. At the QA part of his talk, the unsolveable problem with new projects and startups was perfectly summarised. To give the gist of it:

Q: How likely is it that you will dive into a new project as blindly as you did and that you will fail again?
A: 100%.

If you start a new project, you have to be 100% convinced and enthusiastic about it. Otherwise it will not work. But this also means that you will not see some dangers or issues in the project, which you normally would. Or you see them, but ignore them because of your enthusiasm. This issue is not really solveable. We all make mistakes and we all have projects which fail. We simply need to cope with it.

The after party in the Moritzbastei was legendary as always. Great people, many new faces, new ideas, new projects, good (and quite a lot of) beer, good food… What else do you need for a good night out?
But unfortunately, we were told to go at 2:30am quite rudely again. It would be cool if the party was a bit more open-endish and if one would handle the guests as that what they are – guests.

In the end, it is like every year. I had a great time in Leipzig with wonderful and intersting people and talks. The only bad feeling I always have is that I wanted to talk to some specific people and that did not work out. I guess I need to create a TODO list next time and will not take the train back until each and every TODO is done 😉

Additionally, every year I think „next time I will give a talk“, but still, I do not. Besides my quite limited time, it is actually the lack of a proper topic, which prevents me from submitting a talk. So if you want to hear something from me regarding a specific topic, please let me know!

For those who could not make it to Leipzig this year, there are mainly two good resources. First, you should have a look at the Twitter wall, which shows lots of lots of interesting tweets regarding #mm16de. Second, there are already many interesting reviews – all of them are in German though. Here are links to them in no particular order:

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