Magento’s Collective Approach to Innovation

The power of Magento lies in the passion of developers and e-commerce enthusiasts involved in working on that robust, open-source software. Driven by the need for innovation and a strong sense of community, Magento’s core architects decided to launch the Meet Magento Association—an organization supporting everyone using the platform.

In an effort to encourage the community to actively participate in the process of improving Magento, the Meet Magento Association created a Distributed Contribution Day—a series of workshops where all Magento supporters can work together to help make the platform better.

Everybody Can Improve Magento

The first edition of the event was open to all: expert Magento developers, newbies, or contributors interested in introducing changes. The only requirement was an active GitHub account and an eagerness to test one’s skills and make something creative.

All Magento enthusiasts could participate in the Contribution Day from everywhere across the globe, but there were also several on-site locations available to attendees.

In Poland, the Distributed Magento Contribution Day was organized by Bold Brand Commerce in their offices in Cracow. Igor Miniailo, the main Magento 2 architect, oversaw the whole event.

Let the Hackathon Begin

The event opened up with a multimedia presentation of the new features in Magento 2. After the presentation, the time came for the most exciting part of the day—the hackathon.

We live-streamed with fellow hackathoners from Spain, Ukraine, Slovenia, Argentina, the Netherlands, UK, Australia, and many other countries. The conference was a great opportunity to network and compare ideas with developers from all around the world.

The developers could choose several different thematic paths and tasks to solve. The tasks were created by Magento 2 users based on their expectations as to how the platform should work.

Among the developed functionalities were:

• Multi-Source Inventory (MSI)—a new warehouse management system
• Bulk API—asynchronous Batch REST API (multiple entities in one query)
• Adjusting Magento’s code to PHP 7.2
• Import/Export—general upgrades
• Writing tests
• Code review
• Creating Pull Request to develop Magento 2 branch

Eight hours of coding, testing, and brainstorming allowed me to see Magento 2 from a completely different perspective, but it also helped me learn a slew of new and handy skills. Being up to date with useful solutions in Magento is a valuable asset when developing e-commerce projects, significantly improving the final quality of the product. As for the goal of the conference—to develop and upgrade Magento 2—the united effort of developers from across the globe made it happen, and I’m sure all the solutions proposed during the Contribution Day will be visible in the next release of Magento.

Polcode is an international full-cycle software house with over 1,200 completed projects. Propelled by passion and ambition, we’ve coded for over 800 businesses across the globe. If you want to talk in detail about your e-commerce project, contact us. We’ll be happy to help you get your idea off the ground. Check out some of our works.