2020, a year in review
Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, 2020 wasn’t a year like others, we all know. Nevertheless, I reached significant achievements, and in this article, I want to celebrate the people that allowed that.
The 2020 Magento Certification Challenge
Let’s start from where I ended up last year’s review: the 2020 Certification Challenge to get Magento Certified. Thanks to Joseph Maxwell’s encouragement and all the material he made available, my team and I managed to obtain a total of 9 certifications, honoring the challenge above all expectations.
The good news is that there is a new 2021 SwiftOtter Challenge to get Magento Certified: come and get in!
The Magento Community
I want to say thank you to Sherrie Rohde and the Magento Community for allowing me to go on getting by giving: I was selected as a Magento Master Mentor and listed among the top 50 contributors for the third time.
I feel humbled by these recognitions that pushes me to give more and more (I’ll come back to that in the end).
The Magento Community Maintainers
A big thank you to the group of people that voluntarily maintains Magento’s GitHub repositories. To date, we are almost fifty active people, and I’m pleased to have contributed to help Daniel, a friend of mine, become part of this group. We did several reviews together, helping each other, and at the end of the year, he officially joined the group. Thank you, Daniel.
Magento Association
I want to say thank you to the Magento Association for inviting me to join the content committee, whose purpose is to select and review the association’s blog contents.
Special thanks to all the committee members, whose work is always a source of inspiration: Alexa Schlosser, Ben Marks, Damian Culotta, Hirokazu Nishi, Ivona Namjesnik, and Miguel Balparda.
Magentiamo Day
Thank you to Andrea Saccà and all the staff at Magentiamo, an Italian Magento community, for inviting me to speak at the Magentiamo Day about Magento certifications.
Magentiamo Day took place on-line on June 30, and it was a very successful event for the Italian community.
Mageres
Special thanks go to Sergey Nechaev, who helped me maintain the list of Magento resources curated all time long. Furthermore, he created some precious GitHub actions that make our work smoother.
To date, we count more than 410 resources dedicated to Magento 2, having archived the ones related to the glorious Magento 1. Thanks to his contributions, Sergey became an official co-curator of Mageres.
Matthias Noback
In 2020 I read Advanced Web Application Architecture by Matthias Noback. I have to say thank you to Matthias for writing the book I was looking for: a practical journey in Domain-Driven Design.
I’m also grateful to Matthias for organizing some book sessions (still ongoing at the time of writing) that allow attendees to ask him questions and delve deep into some topics from the book.
Hyvä
A big shout-out to Willem Wigman and integer_net for re-imagining Magento theming and giving birth to Hyvä Themes, a breath of fresh air in the Magento frontend development.
That project inspired the legendary Vinai Kopp to improve the creation of grids and forms in the Adminhtml area, giving birth to the Hyvä Admin project.
Thus, I decided to contribute to the Hyvä Admin project, joining Vinai and, hopefully, inspiring new people to come on board soon. Thank you, Vinai, for being a neverending source of inspiration.
Last, but not least
I want to reserve the last special thank you to the Bitbull team that always supports me in my “never stop exploring” attitude.
Best wishes to all of you.
