A New Day, a New Mission

In almost two decades of work in eCommerce I’ve met thousands of people whose lives were transformed by open source. They’re a small sample of the developers who became founders, the entrepreneurs who built entire service verticals, and of course the merchants who thrived thanks in large part to the freedom to discover and build the best solutions for engaging their customers.

But the conditions for success are vastly different now. The ease of eCommerce’s open source gold rush has ended. Multinational marketplaces and ridiculous SaaS platform valuations fuel hype and hyperactivity, taking much of the oxygen and opportunity from the landscape, even as legacy platforms go further upmarket, leaving a huge gap.

Despite these conditions, the fundamentals are still the same: innovation is what shapes the future of eCommerce, and nothing fosters innovation better than open source. Shopware is a company and a community committed to open source – not just to the code, but to the culture of collaborating in the open. I hope to help expand participation in this openness, in the interest of creating a bright open source eCommerce future which would otherwise be rendered boring and homogeneous by the default march of SaaS platforms. I seek the expansion of eCommerce opportunities rather than a consolidation. I see “future-proof” as “inventing the future” – and I believe Shopware is poised to do this the world over.

Let’s lead the change!

Next Chapter

Dear friends, family, and colleagues,

Magento remains a force that empowers merchants to build the experiences their customers need. This was its origin story as a disrupter, and this remains its strength today as part of a suite of customer experience tools. All along the way have been the contributors – developers, agencies, tech vendors, and merchants who have pushed, poked, and prodded us and the market ever forward.

I believe I am one of the most fortunate people in the Magento ecosystem. First an awkward cover letter to Kevin Eichelberger in 2008 has taken me millions of miles to hundreds of stages and – most significantly – thousands of handshakes, hugs, and conversations. It has been an honor to share in so many trials and successes from this community.

While I’ve tried to give back however I can, I could never hope to fully repay the kindness, consideration, and trust that I’ve received through the years. But I think that’s the magic of communities, and especially open source communities – in coming together around a common goal, we somehow defy universal law and build something bigger than all of us.

After almost seven years as part of the Magento/Adobe team, today is my last day, as I look to the next chapter of this delightful, unexpected commerce journey. I will still be around (does anyone even know where the exit door is??) – I wish you all continued success, and I hope to see many of you again as fortunes permit.

All the best,
Ben

On The Commerce Ecosystem

It’s been some time since I posted an article to this blog. While I’ve been party to a number of communications and conversations since my last post here, I have a growing need to explain my (and, I hope, “our”) orientation towards the broader commerce ecosystem – including to our competitors.

In our line of business, the ability for merchants to create distinctive and innovative customer experiences is EVERYTHING, full stop. Empowering merchants was a founding principle for Magento, and the Magento ecosystem has driven expectations for merchant control of customer experience ever since. Fortunately for merchants (and for us as well), we have competitors who shape this dynamic along with us. This is an inherently good thing. The success of merchants and commerce platforms is a collective, self-sustaining economy. Together we all – merchants, platforms, and platform ecosystems – create more value for our respective businesses.

Given my role as Magento’s evangelist, I am often asked my opinion on our competitors, and more specifically on the crossover between our community, customers, and competitors with these other solutions. Many people expect me to be opposed to the various regional and enterprise players as though this were a zero-sum game where ecosystems lose or gain value based on deals won. I am here to tell you that this has never been, nor should it ever be, the case. Every person involved in commerce should be seeking the best solution for a merchant, and as participants of an ecosystem (or ecosystems), doing their best to add value to those solutions, which is easier to do in some ecosystems than others (NB: it’s very easy to add ecosystem value in the Magento world). To do anything less is just a waste. In commerce, capital and fitment combine to fuel innovation velocity, and I can’t think of anything more important in this line of work.

The proper measure of a commerce platform’s worth is its ability to solve the evolving challenges of commerce, particularly around customer experience management. Each platform and platform ecosystem have distinct approaches to solving these challenges, and we each serve our respective roles in the overall landscape of commerce. For me it is paramount that each platform and ecosystem do & market their abilities as best they can, and to sell that capacity as appropriately as they can. Second to this is, in my opinion, for these ecosystems to work closely with one another to ensure that we deliver merchants to the best solution – both for where they are now and for where they aspire to be.

Facilitating merchant innovation is something which unites Magento with every other commerce offering in the business. I can think of no more important focus than this. It is therefore incumbent on every commerce platform to be the best at what they do, and to engage & enable the merchants who will be best served by their offering. (*It’s not always Magento – but most of the time it is. What can I say, I’m a little biased ).

Magento Association Official Update #1

Hello Magento community.

It has been quite a momentous time at Magento. Rocketing out of Imagine and straight into a series of events in Asia and Europe, I was taken by surprise (pleasantly so) regarding the Adobe announcement. Our teams are working together quickly to expand our outreach and interaction with the Magento and Adobe communities of users and developers.

Among the many new things happening in our world is the formation of the Magento Association, announced by Magento CMO Andrea Ward at Imagine this year. In the interest of establishing and maintaining transparency regarding the Association, I’d like to share some information with you as well as an update on progress.

Magento Association Timeline

  • October 2017: Discussion between Magento & MMA
  • January 2018: Launch Association Management company research
  • March 2018: Launch Association Management company selected
  • April 2018: Magento Association announced
  • June 2018: Initial brainstorming sessions (US, Europe, LATAM + India)
  • July-September: Internal planning, public feedback
  • October 2018: Magento Association established

TL;DR: What is the Magento Association?

Right now it is just an idea for the future benefit of the community, but one that will be realized. This idea is being made a reality through a deliberate, open process. It will be a replacement for the Meet Magento Association, with a likely expanded scope and deepened community involvement based on copious amounts of community input.

Why Magento Association?

Ever since its grassroots beginning, Meet Magento has grown to be one of the most important initiatives for connecting the community, the company and the growing business of Magento throughout the world. Over the past few years we saw an opportunity to support the Meet Magento network by partnering with the Meet Magento Association (MMA), a German-based trade association which administers the Meet Magento brand. MMA serves the worldwide Magento community through various business and educational initiatives as well as facilitating the growing footprint of Meet Magento events. In pursuit of expanding on this mission and these activities, we began discussions with MMA president Thomas Goletz. We eventually settled on establishing an independent, US-based trade association which will take one of the chief responsibilities of MMA: maintaining and extending the Meet Magento event network as well as licensing of the Meet Magento brand to vetted organizers.

I have a broader vision as well, one in which the Association becomes a venue for all Magento event organizers to work together as well as for community members to better connect with each other and with Magento, Inc. – but we have more work ahead of us to see if, how, and when that broad vision makes sense.

What will the Magento Association Look Like?

Once we realized this path, we began to consider how best to administer Meet Magento, and what kinds of other purposes and people it might serve. My main concerns were to preserve the independence of Meet Magento, which I credit as the most important part of its survival and growth. This pointed us to establishing a non-profit organization. This means that while Magento, Inc takes on the six-figure cost of researching and establishing the association entity, it is specifically limited from being overly commercialized by anyone – including Magento. Win-win! While this was the obvious course of action, creating independent trade associations isn’t a core competency of mine or of the company, so I had my concerns about how to proceed. However, It turns out that there are companies which help other companies solve this exact problem!

The Magento Association Process

Late in 2017 we began looking at how other technology (especially open source) companies have helped establish associations for their communities. In particular, Mark Lenhard (my boss), reached out to Dries Buytaert of Drupal, who connected us with Megan Sanicki, Executive Director of the Drupal Association. Conversations with her led us to the world of Association Management Companies (AMCs), which Brittany Mosquera, Shahadat Hassan, and I spent the first part of 2017 evaluating. In the end, we selected SmithBucklin as our association launch partner. You can find some details about them online: http://www.smithbucklin.com/about/our-culture/

We selected SmithBucklin for many reasons, including their corporate history, ethos, and their long-running success creating sustainable technology associations. What most encouraged us about SmithBucklin is their time-tested process of shared initial discovery in order to best define the organization structure, to identify the audiences it serves, and most importantly to ensure that it is self-sustaining. I characterize this initial step as a deep dive into the current character, activities, resources, and needs of the Magento community, with a goal of establishing a vision for how Magento and the community can grow to meet the challenges of today as well as the future. Feel free to reach out to Josh Berman from SmithBucklin’s Technology practice: jberman@smithbucklin.com for more details

To that end, we’ve recently held a couple of brainstorming sessions, one in Chicago at the SmithBucklin headquarters and one in Leipzig, Germany after Meet Magento Germany (and the announcement that the Adobe acquisition is complete). We also conducted a virtual meeting to  involve LATAM and APAC community members. These meetings were an honest, introspective, and intense look at our community and activities. They have been purely explorational, mainly for the benefit of SmithBucklin to understand the scope of what we’re trying to accomplish.

Process Interlude: Addressing Concerns

I’d like to address some of the concerns and feedback regarding the initial nature of these meetings. Our community tends to be wise, opinionated, and vocal, and I think most would agree with me when I say that transparency is a core value – perhaps the primary core value. It was no surprise to me to hear misgivings around the silence and lack of visibility regarding the brainstorming sessions (e.g. what they are, who was invited and why) and I admit to feeling some dissonance organizing them in silence. That said, we all have a monumental task ahead of us, and we have to start small in order to have focus. I liken it to building a big, beautiful building for us all to work in: it does no good to have all of the materials show up at once, when what’s needed is to clear some space and then go about construction with planning, purpose, and process.

I’d say that this initial process is going well. We’ve uncovered and unpacked several concerns, perspectives, and ideas to consider / challenges to meet. These early discoveries will help to drive the process forward constructively. That said, there were some things that I would like to own publicly:

  1. First, the silence about even this initial phase was not ideal. In retrospect, I think the community at large would have been less mistrustful of our process if I’d published our intentions earlier. Going forward I’d rather deal with telling several people to wait for a chance to offer input, rather than just ask them to trust me. At least that way people have had a chance to communicate.
  2. Regarding the brainstorming sessions, I think it would have been good to publish our criteria for who was selected to sit in the room, because it gives an appearance of favoritism when the criteria aren’t clear (thanks to Eric Hilleman from MageMojo for this suggestion). These meetings were used to gather input from Magento Masters, prospective commercial partners to the association, top core contributors, and event organizers from several event imprints (Meet Magento, MageUnconference, MageTitans, Magento Stammtisch, Magento Meetups, and Christmage).
  3. One glaring failure of mine in organizing the brainstorming sessions: I intended to limit participation to one person per company (in order to avoid the appearance of excessive influence), but due to less-than-clear organization on my part, some companies ended up with two people present in the Leipzig meeting. In retrospect, I wouldn’t have limited things in this way, and I apologize to all who were affected by this.

Teething pains aside, I’m thankful to share this process update along with the notes from the brainstorming sessions with everyone for your collective consideration and comment. It is a personal as well as an organizational goal to share everything in this process as quickly and openly as possible, and I want this expectation to be set from now going forward. Just as Magento is an open source company supported by a community steeped in openness, so must be the work of and eventually by the Magento Association.

Going Forward

After “What is the Magento Association?” (which I’ve hopefully answered here) the most-asked question I hear is “How do I become involved/have a say in this process?” It may seem silly, but it’s really important to register your interest using the link we announced at Imagine (https://magento.wufoo.com/forms/imagine-2018-magento-association/). Beyond that, you can of course reach out to anyone at Magento with thoughts, concerns, etc., including my email ben@magento.com.

Magento’s past and future success is 100% reliant on the Magento community, a community unlike any other in the technology industry. Our values must always reflect this, and more importantly, so should our actions.

This entry is a crosspost of one at the Magento forum. For sake of dialogue, I’ll please direct comments there.

Ten Years of Magento GA

Today, I awoke to many of my friends & colleagues marking the tenth anniversary of Magento 1’s general availability:

https://twitter.com/guido/status/980028808525950976

A rarity for me, I get to celebrate this milestone from my home on Isle of Palms, South Carolina, USA. (To non-native English speakers: one lives “on” an island as opposed to “in” a town.) With spring finally starting to poke its head out from under the clouds of winter and a need to get some #BigDamJourney movement in my bones, I headed out this morning for a walk on the beach, and the thoughts just came pouring into my brain.

What struck me today as I made my way down the beach was, once again, just how amazing this whole Magento thing has been for me and for so many people, families, and businesses. Ten years ago I left a dead-end job became employee #1 at Blue Acorn, starting #MyMagentoJourney, totally humbled and lost, which would lead me to the #magento IRC channel on Freenode and to a cast of characters I still know to this day (h/t to jos, vinai, alan, impi, and so many others for all of your help). Just over two years later I was at the Magento HQ in Culver City, California teaching Magento developers (well, learning to teach thanks to my mentor Vinai).

Fast forward a few years, dozens of countries, 1.6 million air miles, and thousands of Magento handshakes & conversations later, I remain in awe of what Roy, Yoav, their families, and their team created, and what our leader Mark and our team work towards everyday.

Magento is a market-making, life-changing force. It is a source of opportunities worldwide. It is a fabric woven from the intentions and interactions of all of us who have made Magento what it’s been, what it is today, and what it will be tomorrow.

I am filled with gratitude for what Magento has enabled and the people that it has brought together. I couldn’t be more honored to be a part of this world of commerce and connectedness. I hope each of you will take time to reflect on how ten years of Magento has shaped your lives, and that you will share your stories with each other.

Here’s to you and cheers to us all for an ever-brightening future.

– Ben

Innovations in the Magento Ecosystem

Hi! It’s MagentoLive UK 2017, and I’ve just delivered a presentation on innovation in the Magento ecosystem (video available soon), and I wanted to say a word or three about it here on my blog.

Our developer community is no stranger to ingenuity, and at Magento we work tirelessly to produce world-class functionality and a platform which places enables the community’s innovative spirit. And wow, do you all create some amazing things atop the Magento platform. For example, see the botman.io integration which was built during a hackathon, or see Meanbee’s Alexa skill to find a Magento order status.

While my travels give me broad exposure to much of the novel & interesting projects out there, I’m aware that many more things are being created than I am aware of. I’m therefore making a request of you all: show me your creations. Tell me about your future-forward projects which blend Magento and other tech, apply Magento in novel ways, or… whatever feels novel & inspiring. Bonus points for open source projects, though it’s not a requirement.

You can send project/site links & descriptions to me at ben@magento.com.

Magento Ups its CMS Game

Picture of computer with Bluefoot logo and the phrase CMS AND PAGE BUILDER

On one of my first trips of 2016 I spoke at the London Magento Meetup. While I was there I was invited to see a demo of Bluefoot CMS. Despite having a 39.5º fever, I knew I was looking at one of the best CMS extensions for Magento that I’ve ever seen: new content concepts, page building capability, excellent UX… there’s a lot on offer with it.

Recognizing the increasing importance of content in commerce, I’m thrilled to announce that – at the recommendation of our Head of Product Paul Boisvert and with the direction of my Strategy & Growth colleague Peter Sheldon – Magento has acquired the technology behind Bluefoot CMS and will be integrating it into our platform in 2017.

We know that our users will have several questions such as which features will be implemented for Enterprise Edition and Community Edition. A preliminary guide with some answers can be found at the announcement post on our official blog. You can post comments and questions to me here, which I will answer as best I can. Also, we are mapping out a number of improvements for content management in 2017. I am representing the ecosystem’s interests during this process, and will share this part of the roadmap as soon as we have more details.

I’m excited for Magento in 2017. As always we have a lot going on and are looking forward to moving the world of commerce ever forward with the help and support of our community.

Free Magento 2 On-Demand Courses

Hello everyone!

I’m Ben Marks, Magento’s chief Evangelist, and I have some very good news about education for developers who are interested in Magento 2: the tl;dr is that we are offering several Magento U courses for free during December and January. Read on for background & details, or sign up here!

In 2008 I started my Magento development career as employee #1 at Blue Acorn (thanks Kevin!). Back then there were no formal training tools from Magento, and there was scant information available online outside of IRC and the blogs from Inchoo and Alan Storm. In fact, in those early days Google would even autocorrect “magento” to “magneto”!

This all changed forever In 2011 when Varien (the company that would become Magento Inc.) charted the Magento U department and created the first official Magento curriculum, Fundamentals of Magento Development. I was given an offer to teach the initial course alongside my friend and mentor Vinai Kopp. After more than 1500 hours of in-person training as well as hundreds of events attended I’ve personally seen our training have a life-changing impact for hundreds of developers. I’m anecdotally aware of similar effects for the thousands of developers around the world who watched the on-demand version of this training. These experiences have given me a deep appreciation for the power and effectiveness of our developer education. Put succinctly, our enablement of developers is us doing our absolute best for our ecosystem.

Because of my experiences I believe in and advocate for broad & affordable education as a way to empower more developers to do well in the world of Magento. Whereas the success of Magento is closely tied to the abilities of our developers, we are shaking things up in Magento U. For the second time in its history, Magento U is offering online training for free – you need only register to take advantage of it. Right now, you can get the following four courses for free during December and January:

I encourage every developer to avail him or herself of this opportunity.

For those of you who take advantage of our free training, I’m asking you to let me know what you think of the curricula, the materials, as well as any success or issues you have following along. Your feedback will help us to refactor existing courses, to build new courses, and to improve our overall product.

In 2017 you can look forward to more education innovation in the form of new courses, new delivery mechanisms, as well as Magento 2-focused certifications. As always, your ideas & feedback are a crucial part of our success, so please feel free to share with us early & often.

UI Components Doc Sprint: Hello Kyiv!

Doc Sprint in Kyiv
August 15-18, 2016
Guest Blog by Tana Berry, Magento DevDocs team

There are a handful of people in the world who truly understand UI Components well, and putting them in a room together for a full week made for a fascinating event.

Magento 2, like all feature-rich platforms, has some complexities. UI Components, introduced in 2.0, is a feature with perhaps one of the biggest needs for solid documentation.

The power of being able to quickly add a button set, drop-down list, or a new form onto a page, and then to be able to customize that element as deeply as needed, is easily understood.

But the nuances of the code structure, the configuration workflow, and the many parts and pieces of a UI Component instance require a closer look to really understand. Data sources, .php modifiers, generated JSON content, a lot of xml, nested nodes that allow for an extreme level of customization, Javascript, .xhtml templates… there is a lot going on. And when things don’t work, what about debugging??

The community asked for better documentation around UI Components, and we heard you. We would like to thank some very specific wording in one particularly painful GitHub Issue; a few key phrases resulted in the first ever Magento Doc Sprint. Thank You and Дякую!

Hello Kyiv

About two thirds of our development and testing teams are in the beautiful city of Kyiv (along with many other essential staff). The office there is spread out on two floors of a big, modern building (with an amazing coffee shop on the ground floor). I’ve been to Kyiv four times over the past 9 years for software dev work, and I can say that the energy level and creativity buzz in the Magento offices is incredible and unmatched. I could barely wait to get started!

Kyiv_office_exterior       Kyiv_office_interior_flags

The engineers who developed UI Components, with guidance from our resident yogi Vitaliy Korotun, are there. The Frontend team is one of the many dedicated scrum teams in the Kyiv offices, and they were the ones I needed to talk to.

vitaly_yoda_cutout_orig

DevDocs realized that we need get the deep technical knowledge that is in their heads out and into the documentation, and a Doc Sprint is a terrifically effective method for doing this.

But Magento had never done one before, most developers in the world haven’t (*yet*!), so there had to be some warm-up conversations, some explanations, and well… convincing.

Brief History of Doc Sprints

Doc Sprints have been around for a while; small, company-specific ones started in the late 2000s. In 2011 gnome hosted a popular event in exotic Brno, Czech Republic, and Mozilla sponsored a Javascript-centric Doc Sprint in Berlin. Australia-based Atlassian made an art form of them in the early 2010s, with across-the-globe, simultaneous, live-feed Doc Sprints fueled by chocolate.

The word “sprint” was, from the beginning, applied in the exact spirit of the word: it’s a race, it’s intensive, and it’s short. When Doc Sprints started, though, Agile and our current understanding of sprints was just being formalized. Now in 2016, typical scrum sprints involve code, testing, and documenting… and the two-week sprints used at Magento are the work-horse method for consistently adding new functionality to the product… but it takes many many two-week sprints to get a good amount of docs created.

A Doc sprint, focused 100% on documentation, is much faster… and since the docs are written by the developer who actually created the functionality, the technical depth and insight goes directly out of the developer’s brain and straight into the documentation.

And they’re fun… similar to Hackathons, a Doc Sprint (also called a Doc-a-thon) eschews any overly formal processes, and emphasizes the act of identifying required documentation and then very quickly producing it. Doc Sprints can be an intense, laughter-filled, brain-draining, and multi-cultural collaborative act of creation, resulting in a quality of docs that most easily come straight from the core developers who created the code.

How it works

Before we get into the logistics, let’s cover some important new glossary terms:

  • Object Oriented Bro’gramming: [verb] the act of collaboratively creating perfect code samples on-the-fly, with a sense of togetherness, hilarity, and code junkie-induced romance... in multiple languages. With pastries.
  • Extreme Editing: [verb, from the practice of extreme programming] the process of 3-6 people "demo'ing" on the big screen the previous session's documentation topics, and everyone together editing and tweaking the words and code samples. This was my favorite part of the Doc Sprint; the bursts of impassioned, intense conversations in Russian and Ukrainian... and then the final, "OK, this is how it works..." in English, for my benefit. ;-)
  • Developer-Who-Writes: [noun] The instantiation of a coder who really knows his or her stuff, and wants to take pride and ownership in sharing their deep knowledge. Not that rare of a creature, after all.

Our Doc Sprint Days

A team of developers, an architect, a product owner, and two tech writers walked into a room… and hashed out a rough outline for a new UI Components Guide. Our work started with carefully analyzing the many, many community questions and complaints; what were our users asking for? Sasha, the technical writer for Frontend work, created a wiki page with a rather large table of community issues, with a column for distilling the exact pain points of each GitHub Issue, StackExchange post, Tweet, and email. What are the most contentious areas? What was most painful? We then discussed the traditional aspects of good documentation: Use cases, Examples, How Tos, Conceptual topics, navigation, etc.

By Monday afternoon, August 15th, we had a solid outline for the new guide. We invited additional team members to join for a final review of the proposed outline. Then on Monday evening we asked Vinai Kopp and Ryan Fowler to take a look and send comments, especially about the prioritization of the topics. (Thank you two!). Both internally and externally there was agreement that conceptural topics were badly needed: what are these things, why should I bother to learn them, advantages, caveats for when maybe you actually don’t want to use them, etc.

Ambitious outline... and this sis just the conceptual topics!
Ambitious outline… and these are just the conceptual topics!

Every day for the rest of the week had this basic structure:

1) morning demos of new articles, 2) extreme editing of the articles by whole team, 3) push to internal GitHub, 4) refine outline if needed, 5) pick next article to write, 6) go to a quiet area and write or stay in big room with pastries and write, 7) afternoon demo,  8) more extreme editing until we are all about to cry from brain and language exhaustion, 9) push to GitHub. Repeat for four days.

What a fun (and terrifying) challenge to convince a team of developers to take on a Doc Sprint (and write in a foreign language!), plus explain the spirit and concept and urgency, while keeping it fun with pastries, fruits, coffee and collaborative brainstorming. But it went really well.

It’s a true privilege to ask the basic prodding questions of say, How does one do troubleshooting or diagnostics around UI Components… and watch the developers think… and then they start brainstorming with themselves, out loud, then other developers jump in and start adding information or correcting or questioning or challenging, and next thing you know I can’t type fast enough.

Photos of Participants and our Workspaces

So many people helped in so many different ways. There has been tremendous support, all the way from early acceptance of the proposal, then throughout the actual week-long Sprint, and even now as the project continues at a reduced scale. In particular, the developers who sat in the room day after day, and took very seriously the challenge to explain UI Components, are forever my heroes.

IMG_2339
Vladimir Zaets, Anton Guz, Sasha Marchenko

IMG_2341
UI Components, let’s start with the basics

Anton's debugging checklist grows...
Anton’s debugging checklist grows…

A checklist for debugging
Debugging checklist: next, recreate in a .md file, edit, polish, publish

Morning extreme editing session; writing is hard

Configuration flow... a few questions
Configuration flow… a few questions

Eugene our UX engineer finally convinced Olha that UI Components can be fun.
Eugene Bannykh (UX engineer) finally convinced Olha Nakonechna (core developer)  that UI Components can be fun!

more extreme editing
More extreme editing of the topics in the afternoon

I think that my biggest take-away from this Doc sprint (in addition to a start on some solid documentation) is that cross-team collaboration on almost anything is incredibly valuable. A product is simply better when it’s designed and built and tested and doc’ed by people who can learn other perspectives and create solutions together.

There were many “bonus” side-effects of this Doc Sprint, beyond getting the documents written:

  • Stronger consensus within core team about the feature and its implementation (Best Practices, etc.)
  • Enhanced sense of ownership, pride, and customer-focus in all participants
  • The participating technical writers now feel much better trained about UI Components
  • Product owners had a chance to assess community feedback in detail and consider some “opportunities”

And, I was really happy to learn that our core developers are excited to share with the community and to help with the understanding and adoption of Magento 2. This week-long event is hopefully yet another channel by which our core team can develop not only a better understanding of what our users want and need, but also a sense of ownership and joy in their code. Oh, and… a much deeper appreciation of the difficulty of using words to describe code implementation. 😉

Results, and What’s Next?

And the verdict is…. great, but we want more. We ended up with 6 topics, for five days work, about 5 hours each day, from 2.5 people (don’t ask). We focused on the Conceptual topics first, but next up are How Tos and also Debugging topics.

1. Publish what we have, and ask for feedback:

We plan within this week to iteratively publish last week’s work in GitHub, here: https://github.com/magento/devdocs/tree/develop/guides/v2.1/…

…under a new directory called /ui_comp_guide.

But for the next day or so, we are doing some final edits on the work from Kyiv. However, we want to hurry and get them out there, as raw as they are, so that our community can benefit from any new information AND can provide feedback and even contributions. We are including templates in the GitHub repo; please, if you know a lot about a particular topic, grab a template and send us a PR with your content. Remember, DevDocs will add your name beneath each topic you contribute and we publish!

We will also publish the full outline as a simple .md file; we welcome feedback on the proposed topics and the organization.

Visit devdocs.magento.com to view the new UI Components Guide in its infancy, and all of the other DevDocs documentation.

NOTE: The original UI Components docs will reman for a while, but it will eventually be subsumed by the new Guide; saving, of course, all valuable content first.

2. Write More:

So we still have a lot to do. The project continues on a reduced schedule of 1-2 hours each day, with demos and extreme editing for each new topics on the Very Long outline. We have the interest and the commitment from the small team of core developers to “keep going forward”: Тiльки вперед!

3. Publish Again, and ask for more feedback

We plan to iteratively publish each week’s work in GitHub, and continue to add value and knowledge to our documentation about UI Components.

In Summary:

Let us know your thoughts: you know where we are on GitHub and on Twitter at @MagentoDevDocs, and please use Comments below as well.

And most importantly, Thank you and Дякую to our Magento core developers, the writers who participated, and to our community developers. Please keep the feedback coming: the good, the bad, and the ugly. An especially big thanks to Vinai and Ryan, who planted the seed for the first Magento Doc Sprint, and for their valuable review of our proposal early in the Doc Sprint.

 

Magento Stack Exchange, MageStackDay: Best Practices

In light of recent passionate discussions, and in anticipation of MageStackDay #5, I have been thinking a lot about Magento StackExchange (MSE) culture. I’d like to present my thoughts as a sort of historical waypoint as well as an introduction to (or clarification of) the culture & activities which underpin this wonderful resource.

tl;dr: For me the most important bits are at the end (“What should I do?”)

Magento SE Timeline

How is something like StackExchange created and sustained?

The answer begins with open source and its ethos of open sharing of experience, knowledge, and effort. (My counterpart at Akamai, Davey Shafik, has a great presentation involving this topic, particularly on what I call the compound interest of open source’s collective effort: https://youtu.be/VS0kG3O9Ro0?t=269. The entire presentation is worth watching, but at the very least, watch the five minutes following the linked starting point.) Specifically for StackExchange, it all began with people in open source (and in general) doing what they do when they need help: asking questions. In the early days of the Internet, netizens asked questions in bulletin-board-style forums. Once the WWW came along, forum software was developed, and people asked questions in forums. Eventually, a couple of fairly sharp developers realized that general forum technology fit the domain of Q&A very well, and they created StackExchange, with the goal of providing a tool and a ruleset for content creation centered on authoritative questions and answers. (The genius of the StackExchange approach is that it allows for two dimensions of answering, by allowing for an answer to be marked as a solution by the inquirer, and also by allowing the community of users to vote on other answers which may indicate a better or more applicable solution.) From this grew the StackExchange network, the crown jewel of which is StackOverflow (SO).

How did Magento SE come to be?

The first Magento-related question on SO appeared September 2008, and from then on the body of questions and answers grew organically, reaching over 37,000 questions to date. Adoption of SO as the Q&A forum for Magento increased as more users abandoned v1 of the Magento forums, which had become overrun with spam. True to form, as more users moved to SO, more and better content appeared, creating a positive feedback loop via search engines. I myself jumped from being a moderator on our forums to being a contributing member of the SO community in July 2011, and over the next 1.5 years I spent a lot of time answering questions there. During this time, I began to notice an increase in “user” questions, that is, questions about how to use the Magento application. These questions were closed right away, which is appropriate given SO’s scope. However, I felt that these were valuable questions to ask & answer, and I further believed that there was value in having them exist alongside technical questions. A new forum home was indicated.

Therefore, in December of 2013 I proposed a Magento-dedicated SE site which would allow focused Magento technical and user questions. Initially I was warned by SE staff that they might close the proposal, ironically for the most of the reasons that I was proposing it. From the initial proposal (2012/12/27 01:22:44Z), the site went through the necessary steps to achieve public beta in just over one month, launching in late January 2013, and immediately becoming one of the highest-traffic sites in the SE network. SE decided to let it play out.

How did Magento SE evolve over time?

Over the next 1.5 years the content on Magento SE grew and grew. Many dedicated users engaged with the constant deluge of questions from users new and old, simultaneously providing and curating content, following a typical but quick trajectory for SE sites. Despite our efforts however, the site remained in public beta. We began to look at the core metrics for beta sites: questions per day, percent answered, number of users, question/answer ratio, and daily traffic. We were constantly deficient in two of these: percent answered and question/answer ratio. A concerted effort was needed to improve the site’s stats, and by extension improve the content itself. This is what inspired Anna Völkl and Sander Mangel to create #MageStackDay, an event dedicated to “cleaning up” content with the hope of graduating MSE from its beta state. The first MageStackDay was quite successful, so a followup event was planned & executed a few months later. These efforts helped the MSE site to graduate to a full-fledged SE network site, opening it up for elected moderators, custom design, and other features.

Why do we still need MageStackDay?

The purpose of MageStackDay remains as it always has: to benefit MSE and the broader Magento community through focused collaboration. That said, the collective effort is only beneficial when the actions are obey and honor the chief tenet of Stack Exchange when it comes to content, which is to help it be better rather than to obliterate it altogether. While MageStackDay uses SE metrics to both inform and track progress, it’s essential to realize that these metrics are an indication of site quality only. It is easy to obsess over metrics rather than over material.

What should I do?

So, when engaging in today’s MageStackDay activities, or when participating on MSE in general, consider the following guidelines by to which I hold myself:

  • Prefer existing content over creating new content. Suggest edits, propose duplicates, and avoid adding answers which offer no new information.
  • Upvote good content liberally, but do so with integrity.
  • Down vote conservatively & comment when you do. Downvotes should be reserved for egregiously wrong answers.
  • Comment with kindness and consideration of quality. Comments are the spice of life.
  • Be helpful & courteous to new users. MSE culture is high-context & different from most forums; people need an introduction!

When it comes to content and conduct on MSE, think of the main tenet of the Hippocratic Oath: primum non nocere, or, do no harm. Perhaps we shall call it the Stackocritic Oath.

Okay gang, we’re starting soon. Happy Stacking!


PS: Congrats to Marius for cracking 100k Internet points on Magento SE. Quite an accomplishment!

PSS: Magento SE now has more Magento-focused questions than StackOverflow: 39,000 vs 38,000!