A different kind of T3DD

I’m back from T3DD15 (for those who don’t know this means TYPO3 Developer Days 2015). This time the event was held in Nuremberg, Germany. The whole thing started a little bit annoying for me as the plane which I supposed to take to Nuremberg from Cluj had some technical issues and was unable to depart. So that meant that we had to wait in the airport for 6 hours until another plane was brought in and took us to our destination. I arrived in this beautiful city around 03.00 AM. Lucky me that i had a good hotel booked for the first night and i could sleep a bit until the event started, then in the morning I went to the place where the whole thing would take place.

The location

The location of the T3DD was chosen this year to be the Nuremberg Youth Hostel. But believe me, this is not your ordinary youth hostel. The hostel is located right besides the Nuremberg Castle and is actually in the building of the old Imperial Stables (Kaiserstallung) which was refurbished and made into a very nice looking  establishment for travelers of all ages (the hostel is pictured below).

The sessions

T3DD15 adopted a new format in which each block of sessions would be preceded by a round of lightning talks in which presenters would present their session and then the audience would raise their hand if they want to attend. This way the organizers would have a rough idea of how big the room for the session would need to be. However this proved to be a little bit impractical in the first day as rooms were not big enough to accommodate people. On the second day the situation improved because the process was refined a bit.

The sessions covered all kinds of subjects ranging from testing to security and TYPO3 themes to cloud resources. I won’t describe all sessions as i was only attending a few of them. However you can find the list here (together with the slides for some of them).

I will just mention a few of the sessions i participated and really liked

• Assets in the cloud with Neos 2.0 / Flow 3.0 – held by Robert Lemke, this was one of the most interesting ones for me as I’m doing something like this with Flow and i really needed to get an idea on best practices around this topic.
• Docker 101: From development to production and back – held by Dmitri Pisarev, this session tried to give us a short intro into Docker
• T3Bits: On Stage Podcasting – this was a live podcast with some notable members of the TYPO3 community and the Neos team. They tried to answer questions about these two topics and also the split which is now happening between these two communities.
• PHP at Google Scale – held by Terrence Ryan from Google, this session gave the audience a broad overview of the products and the services Google offers for PHP developers and not only
• Neos / Flow security 2.0 – held by Andreas Förthner, another interesting topic for me as it is closely related to security features of Flow
• Lessons learned in production – held by Greg Young, an eye opener session on how ignorant we can sometimes be and what are really some of the important aspects of the software development cycle, which doesn’t involve only blind coding.
• Webscale hosting infrastructure with Puppet – held by Andri Steiner, an interesting solution the author used for managing their hosting infrastructure

The social events

As you might now there is one main social event at every T3DD. However i like to put the coding night also in the social event category as it is more about social coding. So Friday night it was a Coding Night and Saturday there was the “Main Social Event”. What can i say about it ? You can imagine it if you think at the amount of beer consumed ~1210 liters. Yeah this is for the whole duration of the event not just the social event but i think maybe half of it was consumed during this one. Also this evening we got our own TYPO3 branded beer mug (see it in the picture below) which is really awesome.

The organization

The event was very well organized, the wireless network worked pretty well – we had high speed internet at all times and for our internal engines (which needed hydration during day because temperatures were around the 34-36 degrees mark) we had free soft drinks and coffee at all times. And yes regarding to the heat i have the single complaint I could have. I really not tolerate well this kind of heat (from a physical perspective) and from what I’ve seen others had this issue too. Some better air conditioning would have been extraordinary. But this is not the organizers fault and please think of it as more like a suggestion for the hostel. Coming back to the organizers and helping hands, a big thank you goes out to you all. You pulled of a big feat with this T3DD and the merit is all yours!

Aftermath

I visited Nuremberg on Sunday afternoon and guess where i ended up ? In the DB Museum ! I felt like a 10 year old child who gets a big Christmas present.