Last week we wrapped up the second Magento Developer Paradise, organized by NetResearch. The event was previously scheduled during peak “paradise season” during the summer, but volcanic interference caused it to be rescheduled.

Despite the low-season weather (and quite a bit of rain,) developers and tech-savvy Magento users gathered from far and wide to the tiny Spanish island of Mallorca in order to further their understanding of to build on top of Magento. The New Zealanders assured me it was well worth the trip.

I think the running theme of the conference was how to go beyond being a basic Magento developer and offer fine-tuned products and services to your customers.

Yoav, our CTO, kicked off the event with the keynote, highlighting the history & growth of Magento –and how more and more clients ask for Magento by name. People were literally cheering as Yoav detailed Magento 2; the next generation of Magento. He spoke about how Magento 2 will be rebuilt from the ground up to improve the architecture & add support cleanly for advanced features like NoSQL databases (yay!) We’re taking our time to get this right but expect more details in the near future.

A major focus at the conference was performance; from implementing Solr Cacheing to keeping themes lean and fit. There was also a lot of talk about extensions and Magento Connect, with new enhancement coming — as well as developer tools to test extensions in Professional & Enterprise editions. Other topics varied from ‘PayPal’s Wallet in the Cloud’ to ‘thinking about Magento as a PHP framework’.

If you were following our official Twitter @magento hashtag #magedev, you would have seen lively comments. Participants shared cool tools for development as well as pics from our Jurassic park jeep journey. You may have even seen a snapshot or two of us checking out the local German watering holes.

Some of the more memorable tweets:

@MediaTekShop Small videos from Jeep Tour (2nd group) #magedev http://bit.ly/bS9hVQ

@asteireif I really love this picture http://bit.ly/akoaIP #magedev
@hallsten Life as a magento developer: http://vimeo.com/15764960 #magedev
@quentinnel Excellent talk about optimising Magento by Phillipe Humeau – online speed test link for Magento – http://bit.ly/bm695i #magedev

I was truly inspired by the developers I met. We talked about your more interesting projects, how you use the various components of Magento, as well as the different ways you build your business around Magento. I’m excited to explore the ideas you think will help make Magento better. There was a lot of praise for our platform and a good amount of feedback. We definitely plan on implementing as many of them as we can!

If it is not already clear, we take our developers very seriously; customizing and extending Magento is why we build it & do all we can to help you create businesses around Magento. After all, you’re the ones deploying Magento sites and convincing clients to invest in our humble Open Source PHP product.

I can’t wait for the next developer conference and look forward to seeing and hearing about more cool projects you all are working on!
P.S. I’d like to remind all developers about our new guest blogging series; contribute to community and get your name out there as well.

See below for a map of all the countries that attended. Hope to see you next year!

./BBK

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