Neos Conference 2019

This year the Neos Conference moved to Dresden–and what seemed hardly possible became reality: It was a better conference than ever. As usual the talks, location and spirit were outstanding. Still this year was a bit different…

For me the biggest part of that difference was in the people.

An awesome community! 🚀

There were a lot of friends from the past around, people with whom I and others worked together on TYPO3 and Neos for years. Seeing them around again was really great! Thanks for joining us to (not only) Benni Mack, Oliver Hader, Jens Hoffmann, Ben van't Ende, …

And there were (again) a lot of new people, both to Neos  itself as well as to the conference. Still, at all times I had the impression everyone was feeling at ease, not only during the excellent social event, but also in between talks when having a chat over a coffee.

Last but not least the speaker lineup was more diverse than ever. Not only Neos developers and agencies, but also people from outside our small corner of the internet: Jennifer Wadella gave An Intro to Pa11y, Roland Golla talked about the Benefits of Refactoring, Piotrek Koszulinski explained why it is hard to Create a WYSIWYG editor , Stefan Priebsch dove into Dinosaurs & Microservices, Peter Kröner showed us The Absurd Parts of JavaScript, Luka Mužinić encouraged everyone to learn Lua as a second language, Stephan Pirnbaum gave an Introduction to Neo4j, Johannes Pichler claimed to Understand OAuth2 and Ben van't Ende taught everyone how to Detox Your Open Source.

What Flownative did in Dresden

For another year we at Flownative were not only a Gold sponsor again (and moved all company staff to Dresden) but were also involved in four sessions throughout the conference–see the end of this post for details.

Neos from 0 to 100! 🏎

The workshop–on the day before the conference–was initiated by Jon Uhlmann, with Sebastian Helzle and me joining in to help out and throw in anecdotes and knowledge from time to time. It was well received–not only because it was free for conference attendees–and we already decided to offer it again next year.

The repository with the workshop code is on GitHub.

The Neos CMS Gold Award for Beach! 🏆

One of the definitive highlights for us was the Neos CMS Gold Award we were given for Flownative Beach, our cloud-hosting service optimized for Neos. Robert already wrote about this in Golden Neos Award 2019 for Flownative Beach.

Speaking of awards: Maya Bornschein won the Best Talk award this year, and it was as deserved as it was a surprise to her. Congratulations, Maya! 🥳

Post-Conference Neos Sprint 🏃‍♀️

This year the traditional Neos conference sprint was not before, but after the conference. This did not only mean more sprint time not spent on preparing slides, but also had the tremendous benefit of adding another week of fun after an awesome conference. The only downside: This post comes a bit late… 😇

Sunday was spent hanging out in Dresden, visiting a museum, bouldering and having cake and coffee. Following that relaxing break the sprint went into full-on mode on Monday, where already things like upcoming marketing and changes to be done for the major release of Neos 5.0 were discussed.

The team retrospective was held on Tuesday, this time everyone just knew it would take place, even when it wasn't announced yet. 💪

The rest of the week was a flurry of work, fun pizza and even our world-traveler Aske making a surprising appearance.

See you again in Dresden, 2020!

As usual the next conference date and location are already set. The 2020 Neos Conference will be in Dresden again, on the 19th & 20th of June. Learn more at the conference website.

Oh, by the way: Flownative is a Gold sponsor again in 2020… 🥇

The sessions Flownative was involved with

The Keynote by Robert

The traditional start to the conference (slides are available, of course) had the expected look back at what happened in the past year (a lot!) and ended with a call to everyone to stop and think about why we do what we do–as developers as well as beyond. Everyone can make a difference!

Discuss with the Core Team with Christian & Karsten

A new format was this panel discussion, and after an initial 10 seconds of awkward silence the audience kept asking questions ranging from highly technical to rather philosophical about past and future of the project.

Getting it right: Docker for Development by Robert

Over the years working with Docker and Kubernetes (and on our award-winning Beach) Robert accumulated quite some knowledge and learned (sometimes the hard way) what you should better avoid. Some of this he shared in this talk aimed at developers wanting to use Docker locally (these are the slides.)

Debugging Neos CMS by Christian

Christian took the audience on a tour de force debugging Neos CMS–starting off with some live bug hunting and fixing. At one of our clients the call him Chris Debug for a reason!

All the other sessions & more reading

Of course all the talks were filmed and streamed live, and all of them are available for you to view (again). And here are some other posts about this year's conference, all in german: Welcome to the Neos Community, Die Highlights der Neos Cenference 2019 and Neos Conference 2019 - "Live aus dem Schlachthof".

Kudos to Daniel Lienert for (most of) the photos in this post! ❤️📸

And to Sebastian Helzle as well as Robert for some of the photos.