Getting there

I booked a flight to Zagreb and while I was waiting for my flight to Amsterdam, I had no clue of how to get from Zagreb to the town of Osijek where MM17HR took place. However, I noticed tweets of Talesh Seeparsan and Ben Marks renting a car and leaving Zagreb at the same time, and luckily I was able to join them.

Amazingly, Talesh had an enormous jetlag but still wanted to drive all the way. And apparently, he got a lot of energy talking about community stuff and Magento nonsense. Unfortunately, Nils Preuß was too late and missed out on this - we made up for it during the conference and with a second road trip back to Zagreb!

Meeting with Inchoo

The event was organized by Inchoo (with Osijek being their hometown). If you have never heard about Inchoo before, you have been missing out! When I started working with Magento in 2008 or 2009 (with one of the pre-1.0.0 releases), I started to read blogs on the web of how to modify the code. And the Inchoo blog was always one of my primary resources. Back then the blogs were written by former employee Branko Ajzele who unfortunately could not be there at the conference.

Inchoo has grown a lot in the years: They have become the prime development company in Croatia, are known world-wide for their contributions and also organized Developer Paradise last year (on Opatija). Personally, I'm making heavy use of the Inchoo_PHP7 module to make Magento 1 compatible with PHP 7.

Meeting with Magento

Another great aspect was to meet with the people of Magento itself. Ben Marks (developer evangelist) is notorious for attending community events. However, Max Yekaterynenko (former system architect and director or community engineering) and Igor Minyaylo (Magento 2 architect) also attend to give in-depth talks on the architecture of Magento 2. And besides tech talk, these guys also know how to party!

Speaking about Dependency Injection

Personally, I gave a talk on Friday on the proper usage of Dependency Injection in Magento 2 classes, illustrating things with ugly code that could be transformed into clean code. The talk was well received, especially the remark on the Object Manager being the new god, though invisible.

Great developer track

All in all, the developer track was awesome, full of information and inspiring. It ranged from a talk on PHPSpec (cc Nils Preuß) to a discussion on how to improve SASS-support together (cc Bartek Igielski). From security (cc Talesh Seeparsan and Anna Völkl) to CI (cc Denis Ristic). From frontend tuning (cc Tsvetan Stoychev) to hard-core Magento stuff (cc Magento). And adding to this, if you get the chance to see how Tomislav Bilic (founder of Inchoo) gave a graphical representation of an asshole, you can bet we had a great time.

Thanks Inchoo!

Thank you, Inchoo, for setting up a great first MeetMagento Croatia! If I could rate a conference by the number of notes I made, MM17HR definitely is in my top list.