Mage Titans; a programme lead’s perspective
Our programme lead, Adam talks us through the two talks he found most valuable at the latest Mage Titans conference in Manchester.
Stories From the Other Side by Vinai Kopp
Mage Titans veteran Vinai Kopp returned to Mage Titans Manchester for the third year running, with a brand new talk and some unexpected technical difficulties at the start that kept everybody entertained. In this talk Vinai explored the meaning of object oriented programming before describing how the principles of functional programming can be implemented in an OO way, namely through the use of pure functions.
We learned about the use of pure functions and how they do not change the state of the object that contains them – a concept that goes against the usual principles of OOP and its heavy reliance on classes.
From a personal point of view it’s a concept that requires a lot of effort as one needs to re-learn how they approach object oriented development, something that will be deeply ingrained into many developers. It could be a case of teaching an old dog new tricks, but the dog has got to be willing to try a new ball.
The content was presented in the right amount of detail by Vinai who touched on the key points of a deep topic with the swiftness and concision of a basilisk lizard on water. As always it was a pleasure to hear from one of the Magento community’s most prominent mentors.
Ups and Downs of Real Projects Based on Magento 2 by Max Pronko
To many the launch of a brand new Magento 2 store will seem a daunting prospect, so like a proverbial arm round the shoulder, up stepped Max Pronko to put everyone at ease. He made his Mage Titans debut sandwiched within the quickfire lightning talk round and talked through his experience and strategy following the successful launch of the Irish Store on Magento 2.
Max explained how the key points behind an agile development methodology, consisting of 10 sprints across 20 weeks led to a timely deployment. The infrastructure, supported by Amazon cloud hosting would cope with less than 300 orders per day and produce 99.9% uptime. Importantly, the approach to the ongoing site maintenance accounts for 2 major updates every 3 months. This is a major consideration for merchants and agencies when discussing how much work will be involved on a monthly basis to keep sites up and running. It sounds to me like it will be potentially more demanding than Magento 1 maintenance.
On the whole, Max gave a well-rounded talk with some thoughtful, high-level takeaway.
