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The whole community met this year in a venerable location, the old Amsterdam Stock Exchange. About 300 TYPO3 enthusiasts met in the middle of the city center in a beautiful brick building. This year the conference only lasted two days and was divided into 'Business Day' and 'Future Day'. We were also represented with two presentations on one day each.
Business Day
The Business Day was introduced by Alain Veuve, who presented his view of digital transformation. Overall, the day revolved around case studies as well as the broader topic of agile. Our contribution to the Business Day was a presentation by me on the topic of "Reinventing punkt.de". It was partly about the content you can find here, but also went a little further into the reasons for restructuring your own company. In addition to the various interesting talks, general networking was of course also very important at the event. For the first time, in addition to the exhibitors in the break area, there was also the opportunity for these and other companies to present their products and progress on the Expo Track.
TYPO3 "We are still here"
My personal impression (apart from any presentations) was the certain feeling that TYPO3 is making strong progress again and the general mood was good. Even though last year at the Agency Meetup Days there was still a lot of discussion about whether agencies should adopt other technologies because TYPO3 had become too fragile as a mainstay, there was no sign of such considerations this year. As a result, Patrick Lohbacher's last contribution, which once again clearly pointed out the challenges facing competitor systems, fell on fertile ground. When we talked about it in the evening, we realized that such a presentation would probably have had an unsettling effect last year. Now, from a sense of strength, it is good to set goals and pursue them. My personal example of this was my short talk at the Expo Track about the work of the TYPO3 Marketing Team, which spontaneously resulted in two new registrations for the Marketing Sprint in December.
TYPO3 is on the move and everyone is getting involved.
A festive evening
In the evening, the presentation of the first "TYPO3 Awards" and a stylish gala dinner demonstrated a willingness to experiment with the otherwise rather informal celebrations at the social events. Unfortunately, the information about a dress code for the evening had not reached everyone early enough, which is why the evening attire ranged from tuxedos to hoodies, but this in no way detracted from the festive atmosphere. After strolling down the red carpet and a reception in the area in front of the ballroom, everyone took their seats at the designated tables and waited eagerly for the awards ceremony. The first surprise was the really great conference video, which had actually been edited and set to music at the beginning of the awards ceremony that day. Afterwards, 12 awards were presented, including 10 awards in various categories and two awards directly from the main sponsor of the TYPO3 Awards, Microsoft. Unfortunately, the festivity of the evening was somewhat spoiled by the English pronunciation of the presenter, which led to a few sardonic rather than amusing laughs, and the fact that every sentence was read off the presentation cards. All in all, however, it has to be said that it was a successful event and with a few minor improvements will hopefully be repeated.
If you want to read more about the winners, you can do so at our friends at t3n. The whole award ceremony was announced by the respective category sponsors and afterwards all nominees were shown in a short video. Unfortunately, these contributions were not accompanied by an audio explanation, so that one did not always have the chance to understand what makes the nominees and winners special.
Many good conversations took place during the get-together after the event. Once again, I really admired the community in this open source community. Regardless of whether you are a competitor or a completely foreign agency, you always have the feeling that you want to move forward together. There is never a sense of jealous concealment; there is a serious exchange about current project problems, business challenges or even successful projects. Everything to make the TYPO3 market bigger together.
Future Day
After the previous evening, everyone was a little late in the morning, but by the time Mathias Schreiber (PO of the TYPO3 CMS) and Benni Mack (TeamLead TYPO3 Core Team) opened their keynote on "TYPO3 We are still here" with a cool clip for the new TYPO3 7 LTS, almost everyone had crawled out of bed again. The second day was all about 'Future' and was mainly about setting goals and benchmarks. We also had a presentation from punkt.de on this day. Daniel Lienert and I had prepared this, which took up the topic of agile from the previous day and added our toolset in the area of continuous integration to it. We showed which tools we use to support our Scrum process so that we can guarantee regular deliveries through testing and deployment. More on this topic from our side can also be found here. Unfortunately, our presentation ran parallel to Benni Mack's presentation on "What's next at TYPO3", which meant that the number of participants was limited to five. But we took it with humor and had interesting discussions with our audience.
At the end of the day, of course, the venue for the next conference was announced, which will be Munich.
We are excited about the concept and look forward to being there again next year.
Conclusion
All in all, the conference was a successful event. Apart from the question of whether the expensive Amsterdam was really worth the cost-benefit ratio, many good discussions were held and the very successful and motivating TYPO3 year came to a fitting end.
In my opinion, the next TYPO3 conference could focus a little more on technology and the topic of agile could be de-emphasized. But that is certainly also a matter of taste. In any case, it was good to see everyone again and to push the project forward even more together.
