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Recap #scuc22 - Shopware Community UnConference 2022

Apr 11th 2022

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Today I will share my journey to the Shopware Community UnConference 2022. It was incredible and there is so much to share. Hope I can share a good summary. 👍

My first "in-person" conference after 2 years of the pandemic

In the past 2 years the world of conferences, events and gatherings have been completely shut down due to the pandemic. It was a scary time for society but things are eventually getting better, in a slow way.

The Shopware Community UnConference 2022 was the very first tech event I attended after these 2 years of the pandemic. I also heard the same story from many people I talked to and everybody had the same spirit.

My first Shopware event after a decade of Magento

I couldn't be more excited (I was really excited) to attend the unconf: I transitioned from Magento (+11 years) to Shopware at the beginning of the year (read more here and here). It was the perfect opportunity to meet new people from the Shopware community, talk to the ones I frequently interact with on Twitter/GitHub and also understand the community culture.

27 hours-trip! ✈️

Yeah, as I'm not based in Europe, I had to take a big flight! I live in Brazil 🇧🇷 and I initially took a bus from my hometown to São Paulo (8 hours, 650km / 400mi), then waited (6 hours) for my flight to Frankfurt 🇩🇪 (12 hours) and eventually I took one of those fancy super-fast European trains to Cologne (1 hour). Total: 27 hours and I don't regret one single minute 🙂

Yes folks, Shopware family is growing and hopefully we will have more and more people from all over the world coming to these (un)conference and SCD events for the next years.

Conference vs Unconference

There is a major difference between a conference and an unconference. You can read more here but in a nutshell: an unconference does *not* have pre-determined speakers or pre-determined talks. The event attendees propose their ideas (talks, discussions, conversations...) right in the beginning and everyone votes which sessions they are willing to participate in. The ones that get more votes are the ones selected. Usually in the unconference format, 2 or 3 rooms are running in parallel with different subjects, so people can select which one they want to join.

People get much much much more engaged than in the traditional pre-defined format. Better conversations, better discussions and better interactions. Anyways, there is space for both formats. Or even better, there is always space for new formats.

COVID measurements

The organization made sure all attendees were compliant to the measurements. The following precautions were taken to ensure high standards of health safety:

Work hard, Party harder!

Party is the best mechanism to connect people! This is where the really good conversations start. The unconf kick-off was a party on Friday night! There was also a party Saturday night!

Full house: +100 attendees

A month before the tickets were already sold out: the Tor 28 venue was booked of people! Of course, most people attending the event were from the DACH region (especially Germany).

Voting phase

People were free to propose sessions (open conversations, slide presentations, live coding) and put on the proposals panel. Once it was done, each one explained his/her proposal, then we had the voting moment.

My session proposal

I proposed an open discussion session. The topic was basically "how to best welcome the (brilliant) international people that are migrating to Shopware", pretty much like a did recently. Let me provide a little bit more context: Shopware is getting a lot of traction worldwide and great professionals from all over of the world are paying attention to the blue ecosystem. That being said, I proposed if we could discuss how to warmly welcome them.

My proposal got merged with Wouter Dieters' proposal, which was also related to the international community.

We touched many subjects from "language entry barrier" to "culture contrasts".

Session highlights

These were the sessions I attented to.

Visiting Shopware Headquarters

I'll stay in Germany a few extra days in order to visit the Shopware Headquarters in Schöppingen. It is great to get to know more about the Shopware leadership, core developers, and discuss the bright future ahead. I'll write a blogpost about it soon.

Delicious food, excellent conversations and so much fun!

Thanks to Firegento people

Thank you so much Carmen, Claudia, Fabian, Rico and Tobias for your willingness to help the community and for taking your personal time to organize such a unique event. Thank you so much for all the Firegento team 🙏🙏🙏

Conclusion

I'm impressed with the vibrant community that Shopware has! I'm happy to have the opportunity to attend the event and connect with such brilliant people and experience good conversations. I would have much more to share, but I'll limit the characters to here. Hope to see you next year!

Other recaps:

Please write your own blogpost and send me the link here. I'll add the link to the following list : )

Twitter hashtag

You can follow all the event's tweets here: #scuc22