Mage Titans 2016 – a retrospective

Space 48 founder and Managing Director, Jon Woodall has always been interested in collaborative learning amongst the Magento community. After attending and sending the team to several conferences across the UK, he identified an opportunity to fill a void he saw in the conference format, that were often predominantly focused on the business and marketing tracks. Jon wanted to create something different for the people at the heart of the platform. So in 2014, Mage Titans began; a Magento conference curated by and for Magento developers, in the booming technology capital that is Manchester.

Since its inauguration in 2014, Mage Titans Manchester has become an annual event, and now in its 3rd year the event took place last weekend. Mage titans was founded on the Space 48 3 C’s (connect, collaborate and contribute), opening this up to a wider audience was the next step and how Mage titans was established. The event has been embraced by the developer community and to date has ran in the UK, Italy and USA. There will be the first Mexico event in February 2017 and further locations are to be announced, so stay tuned.

Mage Titans has continued to evolve and is fast becoming one of must attend events in the Magento calendar. The events are attracting expert speakers and industry leading sponsors. The delegates are the greatest asset and they continue to offer ideas to further improve the event. It really is a communal effort.

#MageTitansMCR 2016

At this year’s conference, there was a firm focus around Magento 2. With more of the community developing on Magento 2 it was a great opportunity for them to share their experiences, pain points and how they overcome these challenges. It was great that the speakers acknowledged a lot of unanswered questions amongst the community.

This years event was a first with four members of the Magento team included in the speaker line up. It was also a great pleasure to have Magento Evangelist, Ben Marks as the days conference host. Ben added a real charm to the day and was extremely open to all of the constructive feedback he received from speakers and the audience. We heard talks from Magento Software Engineer, James Cowie and Architect, Vitaliy Korotun. Vitaliy also ran an interesting workshop the night before on ‘Asynchronous Client-side Rendering and UI Components’. Then our final speaker was Magento’s very own Vice President of Technology, Jason Woosley who touched on the importance of community engagement, open source collaboration and how feedback is used by Magento to create a stronger platform.

Of course the Magento-goodness didn’t stop there. We had a phenomenal lineup of speakers such as Vinai Kopp, who has been involved with Mage Titans since the beginning. Along with speakers who have never even done a talk before, shout out to the hilarious and informative Tadhg Bowe – Tadhg you brought the comedy to the Comedy Store!

Space 48

A special thank you to our sponsors who pulled out all the stops. Each stand had goodies and even prizes on offer such as an Amazon Echo, a drone and Star Wars tees – nothing but the best for the Titans! As event partners ourselves, we also had entertainment on offer in the form of retro Pac-Man and Space Invaders arcade games, and to add a little competitive spirit we had VR headsets up for grabs for the highest scorers. Congratulations Matt & Alistair who made it to the top of our leaderboard!

After another successful Mage Titans, we would sincerely like to thank our fellow event partners, Manchester Digital, who helped us with the overall organisation of the event. Thanks for helping us to make the conference so special, starting from the swag bags to the after-party. Not forgetting a huge thank you to our speakers, sponsors and everyone who attended, you know who you are!

The whole day was truly inspiring, followed by a super fun after-party which was really enjoyed by everyone way into the early hours (especially by our lot, see evidence below). It was great to hear everyone’s feedback on Twitter, and hear that so many of our delegates are already looking forward to the next.

See you there Titans?