NeosCon 2019: Impressions and Presentations

Neos Conference means a gatheringpunkt der the community, talks, and a collaborative development sprint. Of course, we were there again this year—and as a Gold Sponsor, too.

After the conference took place in Hamburg last year, we met this time in Dresden, hosted by Sandstorm. To ensure a bit more continuity, Sandstorm will also host NeosCon next year. Why reinvent the wheel when the venue and experience are already in place? Especially since the Alte Schlachthof provided a truly beautiful setting.

Super Nintendo and Sprint

At the “ punkt-de ” booth this year, there were retro consoles (Super Nintendo and an old GameCube) to encourage a cozy get-together. Here are a few highlights:

The traditional development sprint took place after the conference for the first time. This makes sense, because otherwise the organizers often find themselves having to handle a lot of other tasks during the sprint instead of focusing on development.

About 20 developers participated in this year’s sprint at Sandstorm’s offices, including some who are not part of the Neos Core Team—such as those from punkt.de.

Presentations: Major Projects and Best Practices

Two members of the punkt.de team gave presentations this year. Daniel Lienert spoke about large-scale Neos projects. In his opinion, Neos is now very well suited for projects involving large amounts of data and/or high traffic. He speaks from experience: After all, the VVW project, which punkt.de implemented, uses over 500,000 nodes!

However, anyone working with such large amounts of data in Neos should keep a few things in mind regarding development (code), data handling, and traffic management. In his talk, Daniel offers tips on these topics for everyone involved, including programmers, integrators, and DevOps professionals:

Maya Bornschein gave a presentation on best practices: file conventions, folder structures... While this may sound dry, in practice it’s often crucial for the future viability of code, especially when it comes to updates. You can listen to her presentation to hear the tips and advice she shared:

We're especially thrilled that Maya won the Best Talk Award for her presentation—in the form of a golden, glittery microphone! Congratulations again! We spoke with her about her experiences.

4 Questions for Mirjam "Maya" Bornschein

Did you expect to win the Best Talk Award for your presentation?

Maya: Not at all, especially since my topic was pretty dry. File conventions and folder structures aren’t exactly the kind of thing that blow people away. But it’s an important topic to ensure that working with Neos runs smoothly and, above all, that updates can be carried out without any issues. If everyone sticks to the conventions, it makes life much easier for developers!

So how did you manage to win over the audience?

Maya: When I was preparing for the talk, a friend said, “With such a dry topic, you’ve got to bring some personality to it!” So that’s what I tried to do. I wanted to present the topic in a more relaxed way.

How does it feel to win the Golden Speech Award?

Maya: Honestly: wonderful! But I also have to say that many other talks would have deserved the award, maybe even more than I did. After all, I didn’t really advance Neos, didn’t develop any great new feature, or anything like that. I definitely would have been happy to see others win it, too.

What are your overall impressions of this year’s NeosCon 2019?

The atmosphere was really great. I have to say, the Neos community is awesome, and I feel very welcome. As a woman in this scene, that’s not always a given. So I was pretty nervous before my talk, but I hope to inspire other women to believe in themselves, just as I was inspired by other women who had the courage to take the stage.

Thank you!

To wrap things up, here’s a video with some highlights as well as the opening talk by Sacha Storz and Robert Lemke: