Recap of the Developer Meet-up in Leipzig on Friday, March 11th

Recap of the Developer Meet-up in Leipzig on Friday, March 11th

As earlier announced in my blog post on oxid-esales.com, Friday, March 11th, was our first local developer meet-up in Leipzig, Germany.

I personally was really surprised to see 16 people attending, including developers from our partners D³ Data Development (Thalheim, Saxony), GN2 netwerk (Coburg, Bavaria), marmalade.de (Magdeburg, Saxony-Anhalt), dotSource GmbH (Jena, Thuringia) and Ontraq Europe (Augsburg, Bavaria). Dirk Senebald (Gera, Thuringia), Gregor Berg (Dortmund, North Rhine-Westphalia) and Alexander Thomas (Berlin) also took part, together with my personal friends and (former) co-workers Mathias Fiedler (Leipzig/Berlin) and Erik Kort.

Our host, Hannes from Geyserhaus, worked really professionally to ensure that everything was set up for us. The projector and the screen were already installed, together with the tables and power cords. Fortunately, there was no Internet connection; this allowed us all to concentrate on  Christan Zacharias‘ talk about the OXID eShop framework, the OXID eFire platform, how to write extensions, and news for developers in OXID eShop 4.5.0.

The entire talk took about six hours including interposed questions, laid-back discussions and straight comments to OXID’s (Erik’s and mine) point of view. We also had an interesting four-person discussion about the pros and cons of Open Source Software. Through the process, I picked up at least 25 points to be “injected” into OXID’s product management cycle. Thanks for all the comments, mates!

At the end of the day, I think the aims of a meeting like this – namely, getting to know the faces behind forum or mailing list posts, learning about the experiences of others and bringing coders together for collaboration chances – were absolutely fulfilled, and that it was an enjoyable and learning experience for all.

I’m curious now about upcoming meetings in other cities like Berlin, Stuttgart, Hamburg, Munich (in progress), Cologne and Frankfurt. Are any of you keen to take over the organization of such meetings? Drop me a line or post a comment if so!