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This year, Tomas Norre Mikkelsen and I had the opportunity to attend the TYPO3 East Europe (T3EE) in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. A fond retrospect of two eventful conference days.
Our trip to Cluj was overshadowed this year by the Lufthansa flight attendants’ strike. Thus, we had to change our original plan of flying from Frankfurt to Cluj via Munich; instead, we drove through the night with a rental car. Fortunately, the flights from Munich to Cluj are the responsibility of a Lufthansa subsidiary, a carrier not affected by the strike. All we had to do, was to travel from Frankfurt to Munich and arrive in time for our flight to Romania at 9:05 a.m. Even Lufthansa’s best efforts couldn’t prevent our attendance at the conference.
Regrettably, other participants and speakers were less fortunate and were forced into short-term cancellations. Needless to say this had a direct impact on the program and the conference proceedings, leading to some deviations from the original agenda.
After conference director Daniel Homorodean’s opening session set the stage for the following days, the attendees could begin exchanging experiences and knowledge: Patrick Broens provided us with interesting insights into the development and future of TYPO3 7 in his talk “TYPO3 CMS 7LTS: How we got here and how we will continue”, whereas Andrea Herzog-Kienast related challenges in her work for the T3Rookies Project.
Jens Krumm threw light upon the commonalities of Scrum and tomato soup in his entertaining presentation “Scrum and packet soups – Why Scrum Masters are the better cooks”. Following his talk, I challenged the audience to think outside the Agile Scrum and Kanban box with my presentation about ways to improve personal productivity.
Raman Ganguly from the University of Vienna started the second day with a bang, answering the question: “What is a big TYPO3 installation?” His presentation “Working with a large TYPO3 Installation and the experience with the Migration,” contained numerous superlatives and the accompanying challenges.
He was followed by Tomas Norre Mikkelsen; his presentation “Extension Development – The cloud is the limit”, was met with widespread enthusiasm by the audience. Tomas focused on possibilities to deal with the issue of quality assurance, based on methods used in numerous projects at AOE.
Nikola Stojiljković described his experiences with the scalability of a T3 project: “Building horizontally scalable TYPO3 websites – travelis.com showcase.”
Then, a spontaneously scheduled talk by Patrick Broens, “Clean Code”, caused quite a few Oohs and Aahs in the audience. By contrast, Ben van ’t Ende dealt with the sensitive topic “Engage / re-engage: leadership and burnout.”
We ended the event with a short knowledge exchange via Skype video conference with participants of the TYPO3camp RheinRuhr in Essen, German.
The social events were kicked off this year with a cordial get-together of participants in the Café Bulgakov on the evening before the conference. We were able to renew old contacts and make new ones in a social atmosphere. Some of the developers present began immediately to discuss topics of interest.
The main T3EE party (not linked to a main topic this year) in the N8 Coffee & Social Affairs was able to shine with two particular highlights: A wine tasting with Transylvanian and Romanian Wines provided us with tasty insights into the skills of regional vintners. And a photo booth with a virtually unlimited selection of whimsical accessories created a relaxed, cheerful atmosphere and made sure we all left with numerous humorous snapshots.
For the finale the remaining attendees met in the Italian restaurant La Piazzetta, where we reviewed the previous days’ events.
For me, the conference program comprised only a few highlights this year. Nevertheless, T3EE is an extremely worthwhile destination: The relatively small number of attendees and the numerous possibilities to discuss all things TYPO3 with industrial professionals make for a rewarding event. In contrast to large conferences such as T3CON, T3EE offers the possibility to talk to renowned experts from the TYPO3 community on an individual basis and expand one’s own personal network.
In addition, the memories of the attention to detail in organizing the event and hospitality displayed by our hosts can’t help but put a smile on my face. I’m looking forward to returning next year and to report about the conference. After all, what we experienced in Cluj, we are happy to share with others.
Photos courtesy of: Tomita Militaru (https://www.flickr.com/photos/tomitzel/)
