Wir ermöglichen unseren Mitarbeitern die Teilnahmen an Weiterbildungen und Konferenzen, damit sie einerseits neue Trends und Methoden kennenlernen und sich in der Community austauschen können und andererseits auch ihre eigenen, persönlichen Erfahrungen sammeln, die sie im (Arbeits-)Alltag ein Stück voranbringen.
Eine solche Konferenz, bei der die Teilnehmer viel für sich mitnehmen können, ist die MageUnconference. Die Unconference ist, wie es der Name bereits verrät, kein klassischer Kongress, bei dem im Vorfeld alle Sprecher bereits feststehen. Hier ist jeder Teilnehmer dazu eingeladen ein Thema, das er gern präsentieren möchte, mit im zu Gepäck haben. Alle Themen werden zur Abstimmung gestellt. Die Mehrheit entscheidet dann, welche Themen das Interesse des Publikums geweckt haben und in einer Sitzung präsentiert werden.
unConference - Back to the start
We already put this trip to MageUnconference on our attending events bucket list in february this year. So we bought our supp.orter tickets in a very early stage as well. After endlessly anticipating, it was finally time to be on the road to MageUC. So Andreas, Christoph and Max joined the road trip with me. Paul we’ve picked up later in cologne already. He jumped over directly from his vacation before
So, I’ve took over the steering and got on the road 500 km west to the venue, where we first met the peculiarities of the Cologne city traffic: quite usal narrow streets, expensive parking, daring skaters and cyclists. Just always stay calm and patient and so no one got hurt. And so everyone could participate in the opening party at the first day.
The unConference venue
The venue was Tor28 in so called "Kunibertsviertel" in Cologne this year. Maybe a bit tight at some peaked times a kind of nooks and crannies, but hey, that's what makes it more familiar ever. So all good.
The unConference principle
What actually is an unConference look like?
“An unConference makes the coffee break a principle.“by Judith Andresen
“An unConference is all about people.”by Judith Andresen
And it truly is. Just imagine, a kind of Barcamp in large format. The organizes “just” took care for all surrounding basic condition - and they did it perfectly - except of the unConference agenda itself. This was open for everything and everyone and was originated only on site by all attendees.
Not only lectures - "I know something about ..." - were drawn, also discussion rounds - "I would like to know more about ..." or even “Just, let’s talk about …” - were put to the vote. Then it was quite simple. Most votes won and the sessions were assigned to one of the speaker rooms with names like “Sherlock”, “Minecraft”, “Paddington” or “The Photographer”.
The unConference sessions
Christoph offered an insight into Magento's quality measures that Core Bundled Extensions must pass before bundling and releasing a new version of the extension with a core version. However, unfortunately the topic could not prevail in the voting. But this is how an unConference works.
Paul and Max actually secured one of the 32 grid positions with an insight into their experiences with UI components. The focal points of these discussion round were set spontaneously at the beginning, the guys shared their findings and griefs.
Quite popular in the voting were also discussions on topics that are rarely on the agenda of standard Magento conferences. But at this unConference all experiences, challenges, findings, issues - all the bundled wisdom of the participants could be gathered and honestly discussed. E. g. topics like work organization in the tension field of classical office attendance, distributed teams, remote work and work life balance were shared. Also measures for the continuous training of employees, advice for successful lectures and presentations, experience with Magento certifications were some of very intensively guided topics. But of course a lot of tech talks as well.
In the generous breaks between the lectures everyone were able to get to know the openness and diversity of the Magento community. Thanks to the awesome Magento community to make it always so easy and soothing to join you. We appreciate this a lot.
The unConference sponsors and spirit
Also an unConferenced can’t be created without any money and as usual at this part sponsors make such events possible. In first row, there were Interger_net from Aachen and maxcluster from Paderborn, the community owes a lot to them, because of their long term engagement in the german Magento community. So many thanks for this. Another sponsors and MageCommunity players, which are worth to know, were ShipperHQ, etSolution, Brandung, splendid, team neusta, heidelpay, e3n, root360 and Netresearch.
With our engagement for the community, Netresearch took over the sports fun zone with table soccer and air hockey, where several really tough and close matches took place over the conference days. We also met Keyur, our winner of the Netresearch contest MageUC18 ticket.
The unConference team
A special shout out and 1000 thanks for having us to the amazing passionate MageUnconference team with Rico, Tobsen, Fabian, Sonja, Carmen, Claudia, Pia and to everyone else, who supports to made this event happen.
“Don’t go home after a conference and do the same things. Start looking for ways to apply what you learned tomorrow.”by @rdohms
Further links, blogposts around #MageUC18
Mage UnConf 18 — Speak Louder Please by Karen Baker
Scale out #Magento2 at #AWS by root360
PhpStorm Shortcuts & Plugins by Ole Schäfer & Simon Sprankel
MageUnconference 2018: PWA, open source, modern working time models and continuous learning by Anna Völkl
Mage Unconference 2018 Reflections by Tadhg (tiger) Bowe
