Magento is Everywhere, So I Am Too!


Shot yesterday (6 October 2015) leaving Meet Magento Brazil

I have one of the best jobs on the planet. I get to go all over the place talking about Magento and listening to others talk about Magento, commerce, programming, and life in general. With only a couple of weeks at my actual home in Charleston, SC from mid-August through mid-December, the end of 2015 is proving to be my busiest speaking season yet (20+ presentations across 4 continents) and I couldn’t be more excited to get out there & talk about Magento 2!

Starting in August I spoke at Meet Magento Vietnam in Hanoi. It was one of the most impressive first-time events I’ve ever attended. The venue, the crowd (five hundred strong), and the speakers (including a government minister) all contributed to a fabulous freshman effort. After a brief stay at home I spoke at New Zealand PHP Conference’s sophomore show. While more lightly attended than last year, the content was good, and it’s great to make it to the end of the Internet. I took advantage of my trip to speak at both the PHP Wellington User Group and the Auckland Magento User Group (thanks to Lero9 for hosting and Fooman for organizing).

After one day at home I headed back out for another freshman effort: Northwest PHP Conference. It was obvious that a conference veteran (Jeremy Lindblom) had organized the event, because it was professional through and through. From there I went to Hong Kong to attend one of the Rackspace::SOLVE series of events. Man, they know how to put a conference on! This was one of the most interesting speaker events I’ve done: an open discussion about commerce with my counterpart from SAP/hybris as well as a mobile application developer. Matthew Hand from Rackspace moderated, and to be honest everyone’s lucky we finished in the allotted time – we could’ve gone on forever.

With only one day at home I headed out with my wife to Meet Magento New York, where I had the honor to introduce our former president and original-bleeder-of-orange, Bob Schwartz. I got to spend a lot of time talking about Magento 2, especially with Josh & Jenna Warren, the awesome duo behind Creatuity, a pioneering Magento agency which just released THE Pintrest buyable pins integration for Magento. From there it was on to the second year of Meet Magento Romania, which was held at a five-star hotel on a hill overlooking the tech hotspot of Cluj-Napoca. This year’s event was a step up from the first MMRO last year, and that’s remarkable given how awesome that first year was. Over four hundred attendees joined the main event, with hundreds more coming in for the tech-focused Party404 at a hot nightclub in Cluj. It was great to have two of my colleagues (Bas Nawijn, our Head of Sales in EMEA and Marc Wiesler, our go-to Solutions person in the region) there to present as well. Getting shuttled around in the official event Audis wasn’t too bad, either!

And now I sit here in a lounge at the Paris airport, waiting to go to Athens for the first Meet Magento Greece. I have never been to a country which is dealing with such critical issues, and I expect to be quite humbled by the stories I will hear there. There is no doubt though that Magento impacts millions of lives all over the globe. I have to believe that this effect is quite profound for agencies, merchants, and commerce employees in Greece. If you are in Greece or proximal, why not register to support the event and the Magento community there?

Upcoming events I’m speaking/attending are below:

 

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