Roman Zenner (Back to homepage)

Having spent yesterday’s remainder relaxing and doing things entirely not-ecommerce, it’s now back to the office and starting to get work on all the things that have been triggered by Meet Magento. This is only a quick recap, I will write and say more in the next couple of days (also keep your eyes open for the next Magento podcast, where Rico and me will also talk about Meet Magento).

First and foremost I’d like to thank all the people – especially Rico, Thomas and Alice – for having made this event possible. As far as I perceived it, everything was running smoothly: remarkable location (who would have thought something Magento-related would take place in such physical proximity to the German stock exchange!), a good line-up of competent speakers and last but but not least an attentive catering-staff.

For me personally, visiting Frankfurt was an altogether different experience compared to visiting Leipzig earlier this year. It all felt a bit like a huge family reunion: I reconnected to people whom I hadn’t seen for ages and got to know a lot of folks in person that I had been skyping/IMing/emailing/twittering to in the past. Consequently, I missed most of the presentations (sorry about that) and cannot say an awful lot about how they went down (Nick Weisser has written a detailed report in German).

Two things I did notice: Although in my opinion it was a good idea having word cafés (i.e. workshops) this time and thus being able to present more topics in the given timeframe, the sheer amount of people in the room and around the individual speakers made it hard for everybody to understand what was being said. And as much as I love my macbook, I am sure that my presentation on interfaces for Magento felt like an eye test to the people standing further back. (Talking of which: If you have any questions regarding this topic, please feel free to get in touch with me, I will try to fill the gaps that the circumstances might have created.)

The second point that actually made me feel quite uneasy – and I’m sure this is an entirely personal thing for the most part – was the panel at the end, or, to be more precise, the way it was being held. Having Roy Rubin on stage made it necessary for everyone else to speak English, which lead to a considerably slowed down discussion. Since everybody seemed be looking for suitable expressions in the foreign language, it took too much time to express thoughts and ideas. (And in my opinion, Wilfried Beeck from ePages got away with his FUD on Open Source better than at this year’s CEBIT not only because he was far more defensive, but also because he had quite a good command of English.)

Needless to say that I’m looking forward to the next Meet Magento and meeting all of you again – talk to you soon!

Update: Meet Magento Flickr Group

Update: Uploaded my (German) presentation to Slideshare: Magento-Schnittstellen