Setting the stage

The MageTitans event was held at the Comedy Store close to Deans Gate and organized by Manchester Digital and Space 48. The night before, there was only a small (but fun) preparty with some attendees gathering for a beer. Coincindentally, it was Halloween night as well, making the area around the Comedy Store extremely busy with elfs, gorillas and many drunk people.

On the event itself: While there have been numerous MeetMagento throughout the globe, this event was the first of its kind. Instead of focussing on Magento store owners or implementators, the main focus of this event was on developers. Almost all talks were on real developer topics (coding standard, performance tuning, best practices) and many of the talks required some in-to-depth knowledge of the inner-workings of Magento. While the earlier Magento Developers Paradises (organized on Ibiza and Mallorca) have also been great value for developers, the MageTitans event gave a more intimate community feeling with heroes meeting titans.

Program

In the morning, Vinai Kopp kicked off the day with a talk on best practices for module development. After that, Alistair Stead gave a talk on high availability with Magento - not just focussing on toolks like Varnish but also MySQL clustering, profiling and caching. Right before lunch, Tom Robertshaw took us into next-level frontend development with concepts like OOCSS, OOJS and RESS.

After the lunch, there were various interesting lightning talks and a panel discussion with Vinai Kopp, Ben Marks and Alistair Stead. Ben Marks, community manager (or evangelist as he calls it) of Magento, concluded the day with a talk on the current state of things with Magento. A more in-to-depth blog on the program (plus some external links) can be found here.

Post Scriptum

After the party, I personally went on a booze together with Vinai Kopp, Ben Marks, Jon Woodall, Vladimir Kerkhoff, Daniel Sloof and many others. Because great events like these are not only about techtalk but also about social talk, this was a nice closure of the entire event. We will definitely attend the next MageTitans event. Well done, guys!