Meet Magento Netherlands Recap

Last week, Darren and I had the pleasure of attending Meet Magento in the Netherlands. Upon arrival, we were able to relax at the pre-party evening event which gave us opportunity to catch up with familiar faces and also get to know some new ones. These included Ignacio from Interactiv4, Tim Schulz from Google, the WebShopApps team and of course the right honourable Guido Jansen.

The following day we were treated to keynotes from Roy Rubin (COO of Magento) and Jimmy Duvall (Head of Product at Magento). They recapped how far Magento had come and particularly with regards to the technical improvements that Magento Enterprise 1.13 brings to the platform. The key features of the product update are indexing speed improvements and caching optimisations.

After a break for networking and a perusal of the Open Space which held various Magento system integrators, services and development companies, the programmme split into multiple tracks. The general session contained our first presentation of the conference.

General Session: Responsive Design for Magento

This session was inspired by recent work within the Meanbee team in the field of responsive design. We would also like to thank Brendan Falkowski for his expertise and influence in the area.

We gave details on why responsive is useful, how to start building responsively, what tools might be useful and some of the problems and techniques that we have employed.

Watch "Responsive Design for Magento" on YouTube

View "Responsive Design for Magento" Slides

Workshop: Building a Magento Agency

Following the responsive design talk there was a short breather for lunch before going straight into our workshop on "How to Build a Magento Agency". We shared our experiences in various areas of running a business over the last few years and what our ideals are. It was a great opportunity for others to discuss how they work and I think people will agree it was a very productive hour with topics ranging from scoping techniques to when to hire, to development methodologies. Thanks all that attended, I really appreciated how involved the workshop attendees were.

View "How to Build a Magento Agency" Slides

Feedback

We would love to hear feedback on either of the talks so send a mail at hello@meanbee.com