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Manchester has become home to one of the hottest unofficial Magento Developer conferences in the world - MageTitans! With speakers and attendees visiting from all over the world, MageTitans is now a go-to event in every Magento Developer’s diary.

The night before the main event MageTitans hosted a Dev Exchange & Panel session at Space48’s lovely new office in Manchester. This was a great networking event to share ideas for various trending topics such as Progressive Web Applications (PWA), Deployments, Training & Learning of Magento 2, and Performance. The event also had a presentation from Magento’s Tom Erskine who spoke about Magento’s brand new Functional Testing Framework (MFTF). The day concluded with a Panel discussion which included our eCommerce Director, Ian Cassidy as part of the panel on best practises for Magento.

The Conference

Located at the Comedy Store in Manchester, MageTitans hosted around 200 developers. This year the conference was very different as the talks were 15 minutes up to a maximum of 25 minutes, meaning there were 15 highly valuable presentations packed into the day.

The conference started with Magento’s Ben Marks providing some insightful statistics on Magento produced by a professional analyst. We learnt that in 2017 Magento’s Annual GMV is $128B with 60 Million online buyers and that Magento’s Economy is worth a massive $5.1B. They're predicting by 2020 Magento's GMV will grow to $224B with over 100 Million online buyers and Magento’s economy is predicted to be worth $13.6B.

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Ben Marks kicking off the conference.

Ben’s talk was followed by an inspirational speech by Magento legend Philip Jackson who spoke about overcoming adversity and finding personal success. His talk set a positive tone that continued for the day. Next up was Magento master Vinai Kopp. Every year Kopp provides a presentation that leaves the entire conference in awe and this year was no different. In his talk, he wowed the crowd with a presentation on how ClojureScript can be used for faster development.

Then came around my talk on CTI Digital’s Open Source module. This was a continuation of our Technical Director Rick Steckles original talk back in 2014 where he had spoken about the Separation of Code and State which resulted in an overwhelming demand to make our Configurator module for Magento 1 open source. Since then we have not only released Magento 1 Configurator onto GitHub but we have started developing a Magento 2 Configurator module.

The module is now at the stage where it’s ready to be released, so as a way of thanking the MageTitans community for their contribution to Magento 2 Configurator, we used the conference as an opportunity to release Version 1 of the module. I spoke about the module during my talk and demonstrated to the developers how they can get started with the module. The talk and module were both very well received by the MageTitans community and I had a great time presenting. The talk is yet to be uploaded to youtube but this year was the first year the conference was streamed live online, so you can view the talk on Twitter’s Periscope app.

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All of the speakers from the conference.

Throughout the day there were many excellent presentations covering a wide range of frontend, backend, developer, and marketing topics all relevant to the audience attending the day. The day was broken up by tea, coffee and biscuit breaks and at lunchtime, we were also provided with delicious Indian food that kept everyone's energy levels high.

The day ended with an after-party where the speakers and attendees could wind down and reflect on the day. There was a great photobooth there that everyone enjoyed and you can find plenty of the photos on twitter.

In conclusion, since its inception in 2014, MageTitans has grown from strength to strength and has established itself as one of the best Magento Developer Conferences in the world. Every year, we at CTI Digital have truly enjoyed been involved in MageTitans Manchester and we were thrilled to support the after party which is an essential time for the community to build lasting relationships. I hope all the other attendees enjoyed the conference as much as we did, see you all there next year!

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