Celebrating my achievements in 2018
Inspired by the article by my friend Lars Röttig, last year I started recording my achievements.
At the end of the year, re-reading what I’ve done, I realized I did a lot of good things and now I want to share them here. I don’t do it to boast but rather to leave them for my future-self, to muster the courage to set new goals, achieve them and remember to celebrate at the end.
#MagentoMSI
I dedicated more than 140 hours to Multi-Source Inventory (MSI) project, participating in most of the weekly meetings and writing code. During the year, I submitted almost 60 commits and a dozen pull requests.
The project started on May 2017, I joined in July 2017 and finally, in November 2018 MSI was officially released as part of Magento 2.3.0.
It was the largest Magento community-driven project so far and I’m really proud of it.
Many thanks go to Igor Miniailo and the Magento Community Engineering Team for leading us.
Magento Community Maintainer
I had the privilege to become Magento Community Maintainer, that means having the possibility to review code and process pull requests coming from Magento contributors.
I processed over 25 PRs that is not the highest number, compared to my buddies, but given all my other commitments I consider it a good result to celebrate.
Public speaking
During the year, I had the chance to speak about the lessons I learned contributing to Magento MSI; the topics ranged from motivational (benefits of contribution) to technical (DDD; CQRS, Event Sourcing).
I spoke at:
- Magento Imagine, Las Vegas
- Meet Magento, Poland
- Meet Magento, Romania
I also took part in the remote work panel discussion during Meet Magento Romania organized by David Manners and I really appreciated the discussion we had together with Marius Strajeru and Bartek Igielski.
Contribution Days
I took part in the following contribution days:
- Mage Titans, Italy (organized by Bitbull)
- Magento Hackathon, Las Vegas
- Perugia, Italy (organized by MageSpecialist)
- Meet Magento, Poland
- Magento Live Europe, Spain
Simply put, contribution days are great. Thanks to the support of the Magento Community Engineering Team we were able to promote open source collaboration around the world; not by chance Magento is one of the most contributed PHP projects so far.
Certification
I got my Solution Specialist Certification; my exam was sponsored by Bemeir LLC, I want to thank Maier Bianchi for giving me this wonderful opportunity.
Personal improvement
In 2017, when I attended Magento Imagine, I left with an idea: attend the Big Dam Run (BDR) the next year.
Late in the year, Rebecca Brocton and Brent Peterson published a training program; I was just coming out of the fire (literally, I had my first firewalking experience) and this was the encouragement I needed.
I trained and managed to run the BDR (5 Km running + 5 Km walking, thanks to Marco Giorgetti for being with me) and the 5K MageRun during Meet Magento Italy.
It may not sound particularly challenging except that I’m the last person to be running. I have some issues with my knees not to mention my back troubles. But I didn’t care and believed in the possibility to do it. And I did it. I paid the price and had to stop training after those runs but I’m willing to start again and get ready for the next challenge.
I feel I must give credit to one of the folks that inspired me so much: Philip Jackson.
If you know him you know why. Otherwise, follow him and you’ll understand why pretty soon, he is a continuous source of improvement.
Book review
I had the opportunity to review an Italian Magento book by Michele Fantetti. After I published my first and only technical book I promised I wouldn’t have written another one, for a series of reasons I don’t want to discuss here.
Thus, it was a pleasure and a privilege to help a friend of mine to realize his dream of writing his own book.
300 items on #mageres
My curated list of useful Magento resources now counts 300 items, almost 50 added in 2018 also thanks to some external contributors I want to thank.
Magento Association
Last, but not least, I served on the Task Force that had the privilege to kick off the Magento Association. We had an intense and inspiring period during which, together with other wonderful folks from the Magento community, we outlined the vision, mission, and culture statement, settled down the inaugural Board of Directors (still WIP at the time of writing) and had the pleasure to see another great project achieved.
Conclusion
Thanks to all the people that inspired and helped me to achieve all of this, it was a great year and I wish the next one will be even greater for everyone.
I leave you with my motto, inspired by Dutch people, that became a sticker of mine (ask me for some of them next time we meet):
