Build Software Better, Together

Last weekend I participated in my first Magento Hackathon which also was the first one in Switzerland. The first Magento Hackathons took place in 2012 in Munich and Berlin. Infected by the spirit of the German events, Tim Bezhashvyly (Magento developer at Openstream) and Sylvain Rayé (Magento developer at Rissip) started organizing a hackathon in Zürich which eventually turned out to be different than the previous events, because Magento community manager Mosses Akizian came up with the idea of bringing community developers and Magento core developers together under one roof in order to fix bugs in the Magento core itself.

Some developers said it was not as much fun as previously, because the team work between community developers was not as strong as at the other events and fixing bugs felt like hard work. I fixed two (minor) bugs myself and can confirm that it was quite intense, but when my first pull request was merged into the core I felt very proud and excited. I just wrote (Magento change log) history!

Baruch with Dima and another Magento core developer

Mosses also assembled a team of community developers at the Magento headquarters in Los Angeles who were not as many as in Zürich, but their activity on Github was very strong. The two locations were connected via Google+ Hangout every now and then.

The importance of this event should not be underestimated. Magento Inc. made a big effort in sending some of its staff the long way to Zürich in order to closely collaborate with the community, showing that they’re genuinely interested in involving the community in the development process. It certainly was an experiment to see how it will go and if it’s worth repeating or at least making the development of Magento 2 much more open to direct community contributions.

Baruch Toledano, Director Product Management at Magento, explained that there went a lot of thinking into how Magento 2 was set up on Github in order to streamline the process of community involvement. Collaborating on Github makes things so much easier.

I’d like to thank all the sponsors and organizers and especially the guys at Magento for setting the stage for the open source e-commerce revolution and helping us to infuse open source culture into eBay.

nice keynote by @btoledano on day 2: #Magento and its community infusing open source culture into @ebay #honeymoonisover

— Nick Weisser (@nickweisser) 10. März 2013

You can find photos of the event on our Facebook page and a selection of photos shared on Twitter in Fabrizio Brancas blog.