Highlights from Meet Magento UK 2024

This year I arrived in London the day before to avoid traffic jams and to attend the programme before the conference itself. Like last year, there were two side programs: the Horror Bus tour (I highly recommend this program to anyone going to London) and the warm-up party, which served as a great warm-up for those who wanted to have fun before the official program.

Magento with or without Adobe?

The spirit of the conference was “without Adobe”. For many of us, this meant an opportunity to talk openly about what we thought about the situation with Adobe. Whatever it was, we saw it as a positive step forward. Eric Erway gave a great talk on the shared community in this regard. MageOS and the Magento Association have joined forces to create a new website, https://magento-opensource.com/, which unites previously divided forces and strengthens Magento Open Source.

By the way, Mark Shust recently published statistics that show that although the number of Magento installations was declining from 2018 to 2023, in 2024 the trend has finally reversed and the number of installations is growing again.

So we had a busy day ahead, full of interesting facts from the world of Magento without enterprise solutions. I was very impressed to see how the community is catching up, even overtaking Adobe in certain segments.

Event-Driven Architecture for Magento

One of the main topics was event-driven architecture for Magento, which is an open source answer to Adobe I/O. Event-driven architecture allows different parts of the system to communicate with each other through events, which increases the flexibility and scalability of applications. This architecture is particularly useful for e-commerce platforms such as Magento, where there is a need to respond quickly to various events such as orders, inventory changes or customer queries.

Key points of the presentation:

• Modularity and scalability: event-driven architecture allows you to break your application into smaller, independent modules that can be easily scaled.
• Real-time response: the ability to respond to events in real time is key to improving the user experience.
• Integration with third parties: this architecture facilitates integration with various third parties and external services.

Test Driven Development (TDD) for Magento

Another important topic at Meet Magento UK 2024 was a talk on Test Driven Development (TDD) by Max Pronko. TDD is an approach to software development that emphasises writing tests before the code itself. This approach ensures that the code is robust, easy to maintain and bug free. Max Pronko demonstrated how to write tests and code for the PopupService, class step-by-step, from test initialization to refactoring and optimization.

Key points of the presentation:

1. Definition of TDD: Test Driven Development is a way of writing code that involves writing an automated unit test that fails, then writing minimal code to pass the test, refactoring both, and repeating with another test.

The process consists of three steps: Red (writing a test that fails), Green (writing code to pass the test), and Refactor (improving the structure of the code).

2. Advantages of TDD:

• Improved code quality: Writing tests before code forces developers to think about potential edge-cases and bugs, resulting in cleaner, higher quality code.
• Faster bug detection: tests can quickly detect bugs in code, saving time and cost for fixes later in development.
• Better code documentation: Tests serve as code documentation because they clearly show how the code should work.
• Easier refactoring: With tests in place, it’s easier to refactor code without worrying about breaking functionality.
• Faster development cycles: With TDD, developers can navigate through code faster and their efficiency increases.
• Increased confidence when making code changes: When code changes are made, developers can confidently run tests and verify that everything is working correctly.

Summary of the main findings from the conference

• Magento Open Source is stronger than ever.
• There is a great deal of interest in innovation in areas such as event-driven architecture and test-driven development.
• Hyva, Headless, AI personalization and optimization of performance are increasingly important topics.

Overall, Meet Magento UK 2024 was a great opportunity to learn about the latest Magento trends, network with other industry professionals and share my own experiences.

Thank you to the organisers of Meet Magento UK for hosting such a great conference!