Sitting in the Nurnberg airport and waiting for boarding is a good moment to look back at this awesome week. In short I had a chance to join another Neos code sprint and for the first time participate in TYPO3 Developer Days.

The week started for me on Monday morning with a pleasant surprise: one of the core developers, Sebastian Kurfürst with guys from Sandstorm media were waiting for me in the airport to give me a ride in his Saab packed full with Mac keyboards, some huge screens and other equipment prepared for the sprint.

I like the habit of Neos team of generally preferring ancient castles to other more modern locations. This time it was the Imperial Castle of Nuremberg, built in XIth century. I stayed in top floor of the castle, with a nice overview of the whole town, which was very useful since we did not have a lot of time for walks.

The main goal of the sprint was releasing Neos 2.0, but I had to spend most of time working on a wizard for node creation feature for Neos, as we desperately need it to ease the life of our editors at SFI.ru.

One of the new contributors, Thomas Heilmann decided to join me brainstorming this feature, and by the end of first day we worked out a great concept of how this wizard could work. Then we had split out duties into him implementing the backend side and me going to the JavaScript jungle to implement the frontend. By the end of the second day the backend part was spectacularily implemented by Thomas, but I really got stuck decoupling Inspector editors to be reusable throghout the interface. Bad experience is often the most valuable one, because that’s where you learn and also become humble about your abillities. I’ve learned a lot more about JavaScript and Ember in particular, so I hope to continue working on this feature in the spare time the following months (hint: if you want to speed up the development of this feature you can always sponsor it).

The most inspiring thing for me was the number of new contributors joining the sprint. You guys are really awesome developers and I hope you are here to stay! In general it feels that the Neos core team is getting to be surrounded by real community of passionate and highly qualified developers sharing the same spirit. We had spent quite some time with another awesome contributor, Tyll Weiß, developing proposal for frontend refactoring (which is so desperately needed!), and later had a very fruitful discussion with team members. Also I found Tyll to share the same passion for CSS architecture as me, he had even written a very interesting CSS framework named Brics (not to be confused with BRICS!).

Guys were working days and nights (literally) on delivery 2.0, and by the time I left the sprint there were only just a few bugs left, so you can expect the release in the following weeks.

The TYPO3 Developer Days event was very interesting too. First of all it was really well organised, and my gratitude goes to Thomas Maroschik, Andreas Förthner and many many others who took a really great care to make even new participants like me feel comfortable.

The format of the event was a bit innovative and organizers had to adjust in the middle of the event, but eventually it worked like this: speakes presented their session in a 8-minute lightning talk, then participats would vote for the session they wanted to join and then the sessions would run in parallel tracks. Because I had to host two sessions myself, I had a change to only join one session: Christian Muller introducing Neos 2.0.

Obviously I already knew all there is to 2.0 release, but when you look at all features combined together, that makes quite an impression! I am greatly inspired to be somehow related to what is going on with Neos project at the moment.

I had handed out two session proposals for developer days, lying at oposing poles of web development stack: Docker 101 and CSS Architecture. It was the first experience for me speaking in public event and it was not as scary as I had imagined :) Plenty of people were interested in Docker, but to my utter surprise, even more decided to join the CSS session! That speaks of a big tech diversity in TYPO3 and Neos communities and is really great: we have a lot to share with each other!

By the way, here are the slides:

In the last day of my stay I met Eugene, a very bright and inspiring person, TYPO3 developer and a real christian. We dicussed a topic that is very important for me personally: how to be a great developer, but at the same time not making technology your god (or idol?). There are quite some challenges a christian person faces when working in tech, and we discussed that it could be interesting to form some kind of group of christians in our communities. Christianity is anything but a private matter, and Kasper Skårhøj showed it very well in the early days of TYPO3 community.

I really want thank SFI.ru for sending me to the sprint and all those who wanted to help me pay my travel expenses, without you this little miracle for me would not have been possible!