Mage Titans Italy 2018: my takeaways

I was among the organizers of Mage Titans Italy 2018 but I was also first in line to listen to the speakers because, after all, one of the reasons I organize such conference is for its great content.

So in this post, I want to briefly summarize my takeaways.

• Ben Marks: in his keynote, Ben shared an impressive statistic: 25% of new Magento code in 2017 was made by the community and I’m sure it will be even more in 2018. Being part of this makes me feel really proud.

• Vinai Kopp: if you know me you also know that I consider Vinai my favorite mentor. I loved the part of his talk about clean coding.

• Riccardo Tempesta: his talk made me realize that cyber-security is a thing we don’t have to undervalue. This idea was reinforced by the hands-on workshop I attended the day after the event; it was really mind opening.

• Joke Puts: I’m sure that many appreciated the clear overview of the different ways to customize Magento. I loved Joke’s conclusion, it will also be the opening of my Magento Imagine 2018 speech: if you feel that, even applying the best practices while customizing Magento, something better can be done, do it! Magento 2 is open for contributions like never before.

• Davichii Vyacheslavovych Manniryvich aka David Manners: I loved the live coding session about git; real-life examples of less known commands are the best way to learn them.

• Jamie Maria Schouren: she made me understand that PWA on Magento is really around the corner and her company’s solution is ready to accept the challenge.

• Juliette Reinders Folmer: after the initial phprustration given by the fact that my answers to her questions were almost wrong, I realized the point of her talk: know your programming language well is essential to avoid nasty pitfalls.

• Igor Miniailo: I liked his complete recap of all the possible testing techniques on Magento 2. I also appreciated the detailed explanation of the Reservation mechanism of MSI project.

• Félix Delval: it was interesting for me to see how much things Magento Order Manager (MOM) and MSI Project have in common even if the two projects are independent of each other. I didn’t have many chances to speak with Félix and I’m happy I will meet him again soon at Imagine.

• Martins Saukumus: Martins was at his very first experience as a public speaker and I must confess that he was great. Not because he is a colleague of mine but because I know by experience what it means to speak in a language that is not your native language in front of a lot of people staring at you. I’m not a JavaScript expert but I got the point of his presentation and furthermore, I was inspired by some of his ways of saying that I will exploit in the future. Well done buddy!

• Andrew Levine: useless to say, the most fun moment of the entire conference was when Jisse Reitsma walked unexpectedly on stage and began speaking dubbed by Andrew. Andrew’s talk reinforced the idea that PWA is one of the next big things in Magento development.

• Olga Burtyka: I didn’t know anything about AMP and I appreciated the level of details and the large number of examples that Olga showed us. Together with PWA, AMP is definitively something to take into account while developing for mobile.

Finally, I would like to thank my team for helping me organize the event and my colleague Andra for taking care of everything during the event so that I could enjoy the talks off-stage :)