Merchant-events versus developer-events

In the past, MeetMagento events were always attracted a mix between developers and merchants. Often, a MM event had a developer track and a merchant track. However, because the developer track was often seen as less important than the merchant track, MeetMagento never qualified as a developer platform in general. It always offered mixed crowds (with all the downsides and upsides).

That being said, some MeetMagento events have proven to be so developer-oriented anyway, that I really enjoy going there.

Then MageTitans came

This being so, the first MageTitans Manchester event was created by Space48 and many more MageTitans events followed: With a MageTitans, the focus is on developer topics. And often, the stage is given to a fairly new speaker with knowledge on a specific topic but less experience with speaking in public.

MageTitans events are great and I really love going to them. However, the issue is that some developer topics are so huge, so vast, that just a couple of talks is not enough to cover them in depth. This was why Yireo created MageTestFest in 2017 and this is why Reacticon takes place twice in 2018.

Complete focus PWA technology

Reacticon completely focuses on PWA technology. By experts, the term PWA is often seen as an empty shell, a reference to a couple of ServiceWorker tricks, while actually the real challenge lies in the building of a complete webapp with a modern JavaScript framework (Vue, React, Angular), connecting it to a Magento API (REST, GraphQL, custom JSON/JSON-RPC), replacing vital elements with faster components (ElasticSearch, Redis, MongoDB, reverse Nginx) and making that whole thing managable (docker, NodeJS). Take a breath.

The resulting stack is overwhelming but the result is a much faster shop, that is disconnected from the original e-commerce shop (Magento): The headless approach.

But we are not there yet

But we are not there yet: Vue Storefront is open source and ready to use, but it's code is heavily being refactored (extensibility, theme overrides, GraphQL support). Deity is working hard on its open source implementation. Magento PWA Studio is focusing on pain points for all kinds of developers, but also relies on the Magento GraphQL team to finish off new APIs.

And the community has many more other experiments that are currently taking place (replacing Magento UiComponents with VueJS or ReactJS components, SlimPHP apps, GraphQL clients, etcetera).

Debate during Reacticon

As such, Reacticon forms a vital part in the development of this new technology: To progress, we need to learn from each other to find out which experiments should survive and which out. We need to discuss amongst each other which tools to use, to find out best practices. And we need to do that fast, because otherwise Magento is missing out on the frontend changes that are currently taking place.

This is where Reacticon jumps to the resque. And to a new format: Instead of just listening to talks, the debate will be on. During and after talks, together we will dive into the topic of that talk and discuss what to do with it. There will be moderators pushing mics in the faces of attendees. There will be questions raised from the speaker to the public, that will need to be answered. And all in all, we are going to have a really exciting day and a lot of fun.

Sign up for in-depth PWA knowledge

If you are a Magento frontend developer, Reacticon is the conference that you don't want to miss. There are still tickets, but the clock is ticking. Make sure to reserve your seat in time at reacticon.org.