Distributed Magento Contribution Day

2017 has truly been the year of Community Engineering for Magento. For many years we’ve been hearing voices from the Magento community on how great would it be if we were allowed to work on fixing bugs and improving Magento core code… And now we’re living this dream. Moreover, this dream already delivers: 24% of the code shipped by Magento in 2017 came from the community. And all this came from 511 unique contributors. Impressive, isn’t it? And what’s helped the success?

In my opinion, a big part of the Magento Community Engineering triumph came from the Contribution Day events. Those events mainly took place in a number of European cities, featuring Ukraine as a record-setting country, having had at least 4 of them, including the one we’ve hosted at our Khmelnytskyi office back in November during the Atwix Birthday Week.

If you’d ask me what was so special about the Contribution Days and why they boosted Community Engineering success, I have a few points for you:

  1. Contribution Days were facilitated by both Magento Community Engineering Team and local partners, which helped involve and engage developers.
  2. Magento Engineers were coming prepared for each particular event and had a number of issues on hand, which they proposed to solve.
  3. Having Magento Engineers accessible during the day helped quickly resolve upcoming issues, as anyone could ask questions and get answers in real time.
  4. There was a sense of urgency that persuaded participants to finish their pull requests within the day, just like with hackathon projects.
  5. And of course, spending a day developing Magento shoulder-to-shoulder with experienced Core Engineers was a great motivation for first-timers to start contributing… And many hooked up!

 

However, even though the Magento Community Engineering team has doubled in size since its inception, they can’t be present everywhere at once, which makes offline Contribution Days hard to scale. What can we do about it, you’d say? But we actually have a solution!

Distributed Magento Contribution Day

You’ve heard it right, we’ve decided to try a new concept and co-organize the first ever Distributed Magento Contribution Day. To make this idea a reality we teamed up with Magento itselft and two Magento Partners – Bold from Poland and interactiv4 from Spain. Both of those companies are known for their significant contribution to Magento each quarter and with interactiv4 we do already share an exciting piece of history – we’ve organized the Meet Magento New York together back in 2016.

The first ever Distributed Magento Contribution Day is going to happen on 24-th of March, 2018 and will allow us to take the success of Magento Contribution Days beyond any geographical boundaries. What is beautiful about it – everyone is welcome to join! Whether you’d like to host it in your office or just chime in as an individual – you’re more than welcome to do so.

The Distributed Contribution Day is going to have five tracks:

  1. Magento 2 GitHub Issues
  2. Multi-Source Inventory (MSI) – provides new Inventory system with support of Multi Stock for Magento
  3. Bulk Magento API – provides support of asynchronous REST APIs with support of Batch API (many entities persisted in the scope of 1 call)
  4. Adaptation of Magento codebase to PHP 7.2. Support
  5. Import/Export general improvements

 

We’ve been particular fans of the upcoming Magento’s MSI and decided to bring to the table a Docker image of MSI to help speed up contributing for those willing to participate in this track. You can find this fruit of our CTO Yaroslav Rogoza‘s work on Github.

We’ve asked Igor Miniailo, a founding member of the Magento’s Community Engineering team to share his expectations of the event:

“As we’ve never organized Distributed events before – that would be an interesting and challenging experience for all of us.
But we believe that everything is within our power and we can provide the highest level of accessibility for people, who contribute, even on the distributed basis.
Thus if you are still hesitating whether to take part in the event – join us and we promise that none of the questions will be unanswered.
Building bridges between different locations and gathering Magento Contributors to help each other and solve sophisticated and ambitious tasks together – that’s the main goal for Community Engineering Team.
Gained experience would be used by Community team when we will organize Magento Contribution Globe later this year, which is supposed to unite Magento Contributors from all over the Globe.”

Atwix is a distributed company for over 3 years now and I personally have no doubt that the offline contribution days approach can successfully be taken online. And we are really excited to be a part of the crew by making this dream a reality.

If you are as inspired as we are, just email Magento Community Engineering team at engcom@magento.com to join the global effort. Feel free to share your excitement in the comments below and I’m already looking forward to seeing you online on March 24th!

Register for the Distributed Contribution Day

If you wish to participate in the Magento Contribution Day from one of the Atwix offices, please register here.

UPDATE: Confirmed offline locations as of 14.03.2018