Everyone Loves A Good Slack Rant

[00:01:25] Kalen: We’re finally in a good, uh, 2 36. So episode 2 36. So the last one was bringing amnesty into the fold 2 35 and

[00:01:36] Willem: we’re finally episodes 236.

[00:01:40] Kalen: 2 36. We’re getting into a pretty, pretty steady schedule here. I think this is, uh, you know, we, we said, Hey, let’s, let’s, uh, let’s test the waters with this whole idea of rebooting ma talk.

And, um, you don’t know until, you know, but I think [00:02:00] it seems it’s happening. It seems this is actually happening. So I have a question to, um, yes,

[00:02:10] Willem: Asher almost at episode 240. Yes. Just four to go. How do you feel about the fact that people have spent 10 days of their lives listening to you? That’s crazy on me.

Talk.

[00:02:30] Kalen: That’s pretty nuts, man. Whenever you take a step back and think about the aggregate, uh, stuff, it blows your mind cuz. That’s kind of the cool thing about podcasts is that you don’t really, you’re not really conscious of the aggregate when you’re doing it. You’re just kind of chatting with a buddy.

That’s, what’s so beautiful about it. But then when you think about it, like, I remember hearing Joe Rogan talk about that as if I know anything about what it’s like to be that famous, but, [00:03:00] um, same dynamic, different scale. But like when he realized he had this massive audience, it was like a huge surprise, but, um,

[00:03:12] Willem: just, uh, two more, no, four more days.

And then we have magenta New York and you’ll feel you’ll reconnect,

[00:03:24] Kalen: feel the vibes I’m already at your

[00:03:26] Willem: field of vibes and

[00:03:28] Kalen: yeah, I’ve been feeling the vibes, man. I’ve been feeling the online vibes and, um, But it’s always better in person. It’s always, there’s something it’s always magical in person,

[00:03:42] Willem: you know?

Yeah. I was so happy that events were back earlier this year. Yeah.

[00:03:46] Kalen: Yeah. Um, yeah, man, I’m finally ready to talk about the new thing I tweeted about it this morning. Oh, wow. Wow. Yeah, the, [00:04:00] the new business, the community.

[00:04:04] Willem: Um, let me life check what this new, the tweet was you have, because obviously, I don’t know.

I don’t know anything about you’ve this new thing

[00:04:12] Kalen: yet. Yeah. You’ve been busy working. how screwed up would it be if there was, uh, I won’t, I won’t even mention it. Um, so , if there was a certain version, um, so,

[00:04:28] Willem: uh, I made a thing as what you tweeted and it’s Mitch chat.club, Mitch private community. That’s.

Tell me about your new, um, board Mitch yacht club. Yes,

[00:04:43] Kalen: honestly, that was a really good name that you posted. I like that a lot. Um, so so, um, so this is a slack that I created seven years ago. Uh, that was initially just, um, [00:05:00] You know, I was wanting to just, you know, have a place to chat with other, uh, magenta developers, doing stuff.

It got up to five, 600 users. And, um, I was real active with it, uh, for, for years. And there was a bunch of people in there, you know, a lot of the, you know, a lot of the, you know, um, big names, as you would say. I see it feels so douchy to say that, but, um, but anyways, it, it was, it was a cool little thing. And then, um, the last couple years I kind of ghosted from it as I sort of generally pulled back a lot from the community and, um, mm-hmm and so, but there was this like skeleton and, and I’d always thought about turning it into a paid community because there’s just lots.

Cool stuff you could do, but I didn’t really have a, a real reason to do that until now when I decided to ramp down commerce hero and I was like, okay, I gotta find something to do. I gotta start making a living. I gotta [00:06:00] find a, a, a way to replace the, in my income and things like that. And so it was this thing.

It was this thread that I’d been thinking about for years and, um, had been building community for years is just a little free slack thing. And, um, and so, uh, so yeah, so what’s objective, what’s the objective. The objective, um, is to. Um, have, um, I should be better at this by now explaining the objective. Um, it’s to have a place to connect with, with your peers is I think a lot of it as an a, as a, like a digital analog to a conference, you go to a conference costs a little bit of money.

Um, it, that does create a bit of a barrier to entry. Um, but it’s an environment where you can learn stuff. Um, there’s also gonna be weekly talks, live talks [00:07:00] there’s um, um, but also like to me, the magic of it, the purpose, the objective of it is more than just like, you’re gonna learn things. You’re gonna be able to get your Magento questions answered.

It’s mm-hmm, There’s a magic that happens when you combine. getting technical questions answered with having a place to socialize. That’s kind of fun. Um, and, uh, basically those, those two things, um, and you know, everybody’s in a million different slacks and discords and stuff like that. But, um, you know, some are more engaged than others.

Every company has a slack, some are more engaged than others. I think about, you know, a friend of mine who was at a company that was this great team, really vibrant team, really collaborative. They’d have a lot of fun together, post memes, da da, da, da, but also they would, um, you know, if they needed help with anything, they [00:08:00] could post a question, get an answer really quickly, very collaborative, right.

And as, as everybody’s going remote, everybody’s using slack or collaboration tools. Now the question is, how good are they? How good is the environment, the community. So companies have a culture, companies have a community component to them, but I’m trying to create this at more of a distributed level across the whole, uh, ecosystem because some, and some people go, listen, man, I already have a company slack.

It’s great. We love it. It’s perfect. I can get all my questions answered. We have a great time. The vibes are strong, so you may not need this if that’s you. Right. Other people are like, man, like I was talking to buddies like man, our slack used to be so strong, but whatever happened, a bunch of people left the company.

Now it feels kind of dead. So this is a, a way to kind of support, um, people with those, with those different.

[00:08:56] Willem: It’s also hard to always complain about the projects and your colleagues [00:09:00] and your company slack. It’s nice to have like a, an external slack to complain

[00:09:05] Kalen: at that. That is a big part of it. That is a big, there’s a rant channel in the slack, which is one of the, like the most active people in the slack like that channel the most.

And I think that it’s really important to let off some steam it’s a human need. It’s a psychological need to go shit, man, this client just told me to do this. It’s so du it’s. So Stu now this gets into the topic I wanted us that we started getting into last week that I want to dive into is mm-hmm how do you create the rules of engagement in a slack community in general, in mind, specifically in yours, specif.

What does it, what’s that line between being yourself, talking a little bit of shit and, and being toxic. Right. I don’t think that you can strictly, uh, define that, but I think that [00:10:00] I’m going into it with the best of intentions. The amnesty thing is a perfect example. People in our, uh, people constantly talk shit about amnesty.

Why? Because they’ve had bad experiences in the past, but what happened was inspired by your collaborating with them and, and things like that. I said, you know what? And, and, and we did the, we talked about it on the podcast and I said, and the, the, the CEO, uh, replied on Twitter, Serge. And, um, and so we had a conversation.

I said, listen, um, I’d like to get you into this community. There’s a lot of negative sentiment. And my thought on, um, on, uh, the, the, the way people should be allowed to communicate is like, Uh, they should be allowed to say some negative things, right? I don’t want to tell everybody everything they has to say has to be.

So I want people to be themselves. If you’re having a bar with, if you’re having a drink at a bar with a friend, you’re [00:11:00] gonna say, dude, this thing is shit. This extension is shit. Or, you know, so I want to be able to create some, some kind of an environment of that, where you can be honest, be yourself, but, but then what happened is I.

I talked to him. I thought this guy, this guy understands the challenges. He’s willing to deal with the negativity and turn it into a productive thing. I said, and this has turned into another, I think big benefit of the community is that all the members are gonna have priority escalation directly to the CEO for amnesty issues.

And I want to do this for all the different extension companies out there. Now, in order to do that, I have to make sure that what they’re escalating. Is not, they’re not just ranting about every ran. So there’s already begun to be some conversations in the extensions channel where people are say ranting, and then, so we’re going, okay.

So here’s the deal. Amnesty released some improved coding standards a year and a half ago or two years ago, whatever it was, they’re working on improving their quality from that point [00:12:00] forward. So if you have an issue you wanna rant in the ran channel, have a have at it, have a blast. If you wanna talk about it in the extensions channel, we need to keep the conversation focused on what can actually be improved.

So if there’s an issue constructive, so if there’s something you hit four years ago and you’re angry about it, I hear you. That sucks you. That caused a lot of pain in your life. You may have had to stay up all night because of a deployment. That’s real. However, if we’re talking here, let’s talk about what can be changed now.

Has let’s point to the specific extension, has that been addressed recently or not? Has that been fixed recently or not? And I I’m gonna need to see some real movement from Serge, from, uh, the quality improvements. I don’t, I don’t understand all of the quality issues across 200 extensions. I’m trying to understand that.

I want to see good faith progress and somewhat quick progress towards improving all this stuff. [00:13:00] Um, so that’s, that was something I think that was very productive that came out of people. Just being honest about how they felt about, you know, stuff they were dealing with.

[00:13:12] Willem: Yeah, I always feel well, always. Um, as I’ve grown through the, as I’ve gone through some personal growth in the past years, I’ve decided to focus on the positive things.

As I, as I also said in the last, uh, last week when we spoke, um, it’s a choice to focus on the negative things. Mm-hmm and I, I have joked on, on the, on slack, in this amnesty FRA, where I said, um, if you can’t, if you, if you can’t deal with the amnesty extensions and, and fix the issues that you are facing there, then the exchanges are not for you.

If you’re above that level of what am MSST offers out of the box mm-hmm and you can do better [00:14:00] either. Either you should be able to, to fix this one load in the loop and create a patch and, and then still make use of all of the boiler plate coat that is there, that you can get for a quite low amount cheaper than what you can build it yourself for.

Mm-hmm . And if you’re stuck with an extension and you can’t, you don’t have the time or budget or skills to fix it, maybe look for another vendor or build it yourself. Mm-hmm um, And try to try to look at it, uh, in a, in a positive manner. And, um, you can get, you can get really stuck in, in just focusing on, on the things that aren’t, I,

[00:14:40] Kalen: I agree.

I agree with that. And that would be how I’d personally approach it. And there, there are people that say, listen, I, I don’t work with amnesty extensions in my particular business. And I think that’s a, that can be a totally reasonable approach. Uh, depending on the scale that you work at, the type of clients you work at, I will say that if [00:15:00] you are a developer at an agency and it’s really not your choice, whether or not to work with that extension, it’s a decision your boss made is the decision the client made, and you’re kind of stuck with it.

Mm-hmm I can understand a level of resentment there where you’re like, man, I, this, I can’t get support on this. It’s gonna take me an insane amount of time to fix it. It’s ma you know, Even still, if that’s the position you’re in, you know, your job is to, is to scope out, Hey, here’s what it’s gonna take to fix X, Y, and Z.

Um, it’s your job to review the code and say, here are the issues and, and line them out. Um, so even then I agree with you. You can be objective about it. You can be constructive, but I can understand people that are stuck with an extension that’s, that’s breaking stuff left and right. I can understand them being angry about that.

Mm-hmm and I think that, you know, that’s fair. Um,

[00:15:54] Willem: yeah, that’s a good point. Yeah. It’s um, I guess in general, if you’re [00:16:00] working at an agency where you work with fixed prices and the customer, the customer’s on a budget and he, he doesn’t wanna spend the additional money on custom built features or mm-hmm and you are, you are the one facing the issues and you are, you, you are pushed to do things to fix things cheaply, and all of these cheap extensions are conflicting with each other, then that sucks.

I understand. Mm-hmm yeah. Yeah. At the same time, a lot of these extensions work pretty well out of the box and is solve an issue that are for. Maybe 80% of the market that doesn’t run a multimillion store on magenta. I, if you look at the 80,000 stores that are currently live on magenta two mm-hmm, probably 80% won’t feel the performance impact because either the catalog is too small, uh, to really feel the performance issues.

Yeah. Or, or they just [00:17:00] don’t have that amount of visitors hitting the site constantly. If you’re a, if you’re a merchant doing a couple of thousand a month and you have a cheap store and there’s, there’s 10 amnesty Sanchez there that are pulling performance down a bit. Um, yeah, that’s, that’s the, the downside of being on a budget, but it’s still, so it makes it possible for these merchants to have those features at all.

Otherwise they,

[00:17:24] Kalen: and that’s the, that’s the thing that it’s easy for us. If we’re in the dev community, working on high end stores, it’s easy for us to ignore. That side of the market, that wa that has a demand for a certain budget extension that solves a business problem. That’s a real thing. And, and the other thing that has been really cool in the community is that as Serge has come in, I’ve had some people go, Hey, I have a really good deployment pipeline that I use that does, um, that does, you know, checks across different versions of Magento and everything else that does code quality [00:18:00] checks, all sorts of stuff.

Right. And everybody’s building these types of things out. And so they’re saying, Hey, I will, I I’ll help you. And like for free, like, I’ll help you if you, I don’t know what they have or don’t have on their end, as far as deployment pipelines, automated quality checks. But I have people in the community that go, I would like to help you guys fix this.

We’ll help you build out, set up your infrastructure. And so now I want to get them to start collaborating so that that’ll help Amnesty’s business. That’ll that’ll eventually improve their quality and hopefully make them more money in the long run. Mm-hmm make the community’s lives easier. So things like that, that can happen ho hopefully that, that can happen, uh, are pretty cool.

Like I pretty, I get excited about that kind of stuff.

[00:18:51] Willem: Yeah. You’re gonna have your hands full, if you wanna do that for more, I know extension vendors. I know dude, because [00:19:00] there’s a couple out there and I know every extension vendor has extensions that that might have some load in the loops and amnesty is by far not the only, and we see a lot of extensions come by.

Like we have, yeah, yeah. So many extensions that are being made compatible with Huda. So we have insight and the quality of, of a lot of those extensions. And to be honest, all of the extension vendors have different varying quality of extensions. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and that’s just, some of them are maybe five years old and hotly updated.

They they’ve been. Kept up to date with new PHP Magental versions, but that’s it. And those might be low running extensions that they, that they don’t sell as much as a amnesty shop buy is probably one of the largest chunks of income. And you would expect that to be right, uh, of high quality, uh, right. [00:20:00] But then yeah, others not

[00:20:02] Kalen: so much.

Yeah. It, it, you know, it may not be a fully solvable problem across every extension vendor. And I, you know, who knows, I I’m hoping this works out, but you’re not gonna know until, you know, and, um, I’m starting to see some specific, um, things escalated to Serge related to specific extensions. I’m starting I’m I’m I’m, I’m now curious what to see some aggregate, um, information on their side, on the 200 different extensions that they have on quality metrics.

And so, um, It, I hope it works out if it doesn’t, it doesn’t. I gave it a, I gave it a shot. Um, if it, if it does, it’ll be pretty cool. And I think that there are ways to approach this, that, listen, I’m not ex expecting somebody to fix every problem in 200 extensions overnight. Nobody’s expecting that, but if they can make, uh, good, you know, material progress that makes [00:21:00] everybody’s life better.

Sure. It’s gonna, it’s gonna require some investment by the extension vendor, but these investments we already know, pay for themselves, improving your code quality. Particularly if, if we, if you’re getting a nice automated deployment pipeline check with quality check, you know, code quality check, those are the types of things that are gonna pay for themselves easily.

And you can find things like load in the loop. I think I, I’m not too up to date personally, on what types of things you can really detect automatically, uh, in a reliable way. But I think that a lot of these, a lot of things I think, um, You can do pretty, pretty a decent job of, so we’ll see, man. Yeah. It’s a can of worms and , we’ll see, we’ll see where it goes.

[00:21:47] Willem: Yeah. And, um, I think mostly it’s, it’s easy to underestimate how much work they put in, in maintenance and updating extensions, and they have a public roadmap MST. Uh, [00:22:00] it’s a travel board and you can see what they’re working on. It’s it’s quite a bit. Oh, that’s good. Um, they’ve been working on, on Hoover compatibility and we, we have, we basically started out, we agreed that they would start making, uh, extensions compatible, and we had maybe eight that we already made compatible together with our community mm-hmm and, uh, we agreed that they will take over ownership of those compatibility modules and build them out to make them fully, fully, uh, fully featured.

And, um, I think they have. About four, uh, four release now and free coming up, uh, which you can see in the, in the public roadmap. Um, and, um, yeah, to do that beside all of the other work that they do, um, yeah, they got their hands full. So, uh, probably when they start to get feedback on extensions, um, they only have so many developers that are all booked [00:23:00] for, for, uh, new extensions, continuous, uh, yeah.

Uh, upgrades and improvements. So it might take a while before they pick up all of the feedback.

[00:23:08] Kalen: Um, yeah. Yeah. I mean, it’s gonna take time. It’s not gonna be overnight. And at the same time, you know, there’s a difference between. You know, they have 200 extensions, right? I don’t know what the current code quality status is on all of the extensions, but there’s a big difference between, you know, one extension has good quality and 199 have horrible quality and they’re improving at an extremely slow rate versus.

Maybe 50 of them have good quality and the other 150 are improving at a decent rate. So I have to wrap my head around how things are improving. A lot of people in the community are literally reliving past traumas related to things that have happened four years ago, five years ago, six years ago. And so, um, that’s, that’s a hu that’s a human psychology thing.

It [00:24:00] is what it is. So what is the current state as of today? I don’t know. I’m trying to figure that out, but anybody who’s integrating with Hova, I know they’re smart. So to me, That shows that they see where things are going, they’re paying attention and they’re smart. So anybody doing that, I want to ha I want to talk to, because I think they’ll understand that this type of stuff is better for everybody, including them in the long term, which is why they’re investing in, in Hova, because it’s good for them in the long term as well.

There’s a huge, um, there’s a huge, uh, surge in the community towards, um, ho I was just talking to somebody today. Um, my friend, Jordan, who, uh, is building a headless checkout called rally Jordan go, I’ve known him. Uh, he actually built an email, uh, abandoned cart thing back in the day. We’ve never met in, in person, but he’s a really cool guy.

And, um, and, uh, and we [00:25:00] were chatting a bit and he’s interested in Hova. I didn’t even know he knew about Hova because he’s doing all sorts of headless stuff. So anyways, um, um, Yeah. So we’ll, we’ll see where, where it all goes. Um,

[00:25:17] Willem: but the sad thing, the sad thing for me of this new, this new product that you have is that it’s all you use all of these no go tools, which are impossible for me to hack while.

Well, I have this tradition that whenever you create a new product that I, that I, that I take a peek where

[00:25:41] Kalen: no, no, see, this is, this is fantastic. Cuz if I would’ve built this myself a hundred percent, there would’ve been security holes. You would. Yeah, that’s right. You had found a, um, an old ma male security hole if I recall.

And um, yeah, probably a commerce hero one [00:26:00] too.

[00:26:00] Willem: Yeah. So

[00:26:03] Kalen: I’m this no code stuff is so it’s so obviously there’s limits to it. There’s limits to what I can do with it, but. Ah, man, it’s so fun to just be able to roll out little features quickly. Um, It’s pretty, it’s pretty, uh, just today I added a little portfolio thing that I’m starting to build out.

So I wanna make the member profile pages a little more meaningful. Um, so, you know, people can add things like services they offer for people that offer services, um, freelance agency type stuff. But then I think a simpler way to build out, build them out is like a portfolio thing. So people can say. You know, so Damien for example, has a page.

He can put daffodil on it. He can put Maia on it. Um, Simon sprinkle has a page. He can put his extensions on it. So I wanna start to build out these member profile pages and then there’s tags associated to the [00:27:00] portfolio. There’s tags associated to a lot of different stuff across the database. And then I can roll those up into the members so that then we can start to figure out who’s good.

Who’s the who’s into DevOps, right? Who’s into Kubernetes, who’s into price configurations. So that questions come up. I can figure out who to route questions to and things like that.

[00:27:21] Willem: Let’s do a voluntary sponsor break and give a shout out to Damien, uh, and, and promote his, uh, his Kubernetes, uh, setup. You, you, you know, a bit more about what he built there, but he, what, what is it exactly he has like this whole schematic and configuration that outer scales Magento on Kubernetes and it’s plug and play.

Yeah. How does that

[00:27:48] Kalen: work? And I still don’t, you know, I still don’t know very much about it, but, um, Um, we had talked about me doing some promotion of it and, and, and stuff like that. [00:28:00] And I may or may not continue to do that rev share thing, but we had talked about a rev share thing of it. But, um, from what I understand, it’s he has a few clients that his agency, clients that are, that are on it.

And it does like auto scaling, um, really well, um, with, uh, with Kubernetes and he, and, um, he has this helm chart, which as far as I understand. Gotcha. Basically the it’s the it’s it’s it’s it’s the. Code is infrastructure. I’m probably using that word, that term slightly incorrectly, but it determines how everything is configured.

So it gets your message queues set up. It gets your auto scaling set up. Um, and it just gets everything orchestrated. So his, his, the way he describes it is like commerce orchestrated. Um, and just to emphasize,

[00:28:52] Willem: yeah, just to emphasize how special it is that he has out scaling there, because that’s something that Adobe still doesn’t do with Adobe [00:29:00] cloud.

Yeah. With Adobe commerce clouds a hundred percent. So like through, out scaling.

[00:29:07] Kalen: Yeah. So, and I don’t, you know, I know some people have different types of autoscaling and then, you know, it’s like, it’s one of these buzz words where some people are like, yeah, we have, autoscaling just email us and ask us to set up a new thing.

Whenever you’re expecting a surge, it’s like, that’s not autoscaling.

[00:29:26] Willem: Um, then you go to 20 server notes and they never scale back down. And then when you need it yeah. For, for just one location, you scale up to 40 and you never scale down.

[00:29:36] Kalen: totally. So my understanding and, and I don’t know how this stuff all works is that he has it nailed that he’s been doing this for five years.

He has some really decent sized clients on it. Um, and one of the things that we’re gonna start to do with actually we already started, I did my first one on Friday is we’re doing these live sessions where we’re calling them APIs and IPAs. Um, PJ, Peter yap came up with the [00:30:00] name, but we’re gonna do like IPAs.

I so, so this is sort of the funny thing about it is I, I have zero interest in IPAs or any, any beer that’s fancy, I’m a bud light guy, but, um, but I’m a bud light and a rum and Coke guy. So here’s the, here’s the rum. But, um, but, uh, but I like the name of it, so I like it too. So we did our first one on Friday Alexander, uh, uh, B book, um, out of Germany, talked a little bit about a Magento one, um, uh, uh, B E M CSS methodology thing that he did, we had about seven, eight, uh, people in there.

We drank some beers. We talked some texts and then, and yeah, it was fun. So he’s gonna do one, we actually have it scheduled on Maia. Uh, he’s got that coming up, I think in a week or two. So that’ll be a good place to, um, to get into the, is that

[00:30:58] Willem: the name of the product Maia. [00:31:00] Maia?

[00:31:00] Kalen: Yeah. I keep telling him it’s a horrible name.

It’s M a P P I a, I don’t, I’m sure there’s some deep meaning of the name tied into how Kubernetes works and stuff like that, but, um, it’s, it’s, um, it’s map yet. And he sent me the website. He, he doesn’t really ha it’s just a placeholder website. He needs to work on that. He didn’t want me sharing the website URL yet, but, um,

[00:31:23] Willem: okay.

But if you wanna know more about it, you should get, go to gray core.io and contact them. And that’s gray core with a, a, not with a E yes. That’s American gray, right? Is the

[00:31:37] Kalen: honestly with a E I can. I can never, yes. I think that’s American. I’m not Lord. I have not been known to be a spelling expert in any language but, um, I think, I think that’s it.

Um, so Maia think it’s neat. Okay. Maia. Yeah. So what are you working on these days? [00:32:00] Well, I’ve given my huge promo advertisement. Let’s let’s, um, let’s move it over to you for a minute.

[00:32:08] Willem: I’m, uh, I’m a little bit involved in, uh, everything that’s going on on, uh, MAs and, uh, some exciting news there last week was that they finally founded the organization in Poland.

Uh that’s right. So that means, uh, we can finally have some financial streams going in and out of the organization. And, um, cuz we’re, we are paying some things out of our own pockets, uh, so far. Um, but now we can get some backing into the organization and start to set up also membership fee and such. Um, so major wise is, is, is the organization.

We started out with Mosca magenta, open source community Alliance that, that that’s right sent into MAs. So that’s, uh, Magento open source, um, which is that’s better. That’s a better name. Let’s

[00:32:57] Kalen: be honest. [00:33:00]

[00:33:00] Willem: Yeah, well, Mosca also has

[00:33:01] Kalen: a, you still like Mosca, you still wish you was

[00:33:04] Willem: Mosca. No, no, I’m, I’m, I’m, uh, I’m, you’re all in more than good with me, us, but it was funny that Moscow means, uh, uh, mosquito and Spanish.

Yeah. Kind of gave, uh, in my head, I was a bit like this annoying, this annoying thing buzzing around that that, uh, was, um, influencing people. That’s fun. That’s kind of fun actually. Um, so, uh, but uh, yeah, ma west, um, uh, Currently, so major-os.org is the website. And, uh, does the content that we have there is growing.

Um, so far we’ve built a, a distribution, a, a copy of magenta open source just to, uh, learn how the, the deployment mechanism works that that Magento has to, or Adobe has to turn this getup, this big monolithic, uh, getup [00:34:00] repository, turn that into an actual composer, distribution and packages. Um, and that’s something that, uh, uh, uh, fi I has been working on together with, uh, Daniel SL and Damien has been helping their, uh, aunt on Syk from a one step checkouts has been, uh, very active there.

Um, And, um, now the plan is to start building our own distribution, where we start adding our own features and box fixes and, uh, and accept merger requests there, which is,

[00:34:33] Kalen: um, that’s so exciting now, are you going to, are you, sorry, are you going to, um, as far as the way, this is gonna be structured, are you gonna have a base distribution that still maps to Magentos and then you’re gonna have a layer on top of that in the form of separate yeah.

That’s why we

[00:34:51] Willem: extensions or. . Yeah. That’s why we first built the, the, the fork. So to say, so that’s a dent copy to magenta [00:35:00] open source, and then that’s not

[00:35:02] Kalen: really fork. That’s a that’s that’s like a distribution because it’s identical.

[00:35:07] Willem: Not yet. Well, so, well, a fork is a or mirror. It’s a, it’s a, a mirror. Yeah, it’s a mirror.

Yeah. A mirror. Okay. That’s right. That’s that’s a better term. Yeah. So we have a mirror distribution. That’s an exact copy of JE open source. And the cool thing is that we, we generate the new releases now also with a nightly edition. So that fixes the issue that people don’t have access to releases to come out about this

[00:35:32] Kalen: man.

Yeah. I love it.

[00:35:35] Willem: And then the next step is that on top of that. So we keep everything in sync, uh, and we keep rebasing rebasing to upstream. Um, so that we always stay compatible with, with the official Magental repository for as long as that as we can make that work. Um, and then we can start planning out, um, architectural changes, uh, extra packages that [00:36:00] we wanna put on top of that.

Um, mm-hmm, maybe making Luma, uh, an, uh, optional package, uh, so that you can install Magento with just GraphQL, uh, or with just Luma or without a front end. And then you could put on top of that, for example. So, um, ah, that’s so cool, man, that would solve some of the, the dependency issues and some of the performance issues.

If you, if you’re running. A hatless front and only then you don’t need the Luma packages that only slow stuff down. Um, so yeah, that’s, that’s, that’s really cool stuff. Um, I’m, I’m, I’m doing three or four, four meetings a week, um, on MAs, uh, that are each is , uh, at least an hour long. So that, that really takes up a chunk of my, uh, my work time.

Mm-hmm um, and, uh, yeah, one of those meetings is a, is a, is a content. Content committee. So to say, while we’re working on [00:37:00] Magento content for merchants, uh, we’re trying to collaborate with, uh, the magenta association there. Uh, possibly we’re gonna donate that as a, as a ready made website with content so that, uh, the magenta association can take ownership of that.

Um, nice would be nice because then we can use some official Magental logo there as well as they are holding a nice, a, a trait model, or they have the rights to use the Magental logo, uh, on the website. Mm-hmm mm-hmm um, And then beside that, there’s quite a lot of Magen association meetings now that, uh, I, and two other, uh, people have joined the, the board.

So, uh, we’re um, we’re getting up to date there. Um, and we’ve normally, they, they always had one meeting a month, which is just crazy little if you want to achieve anything. Yeah. Um, yeah, so, um, we’re now having two per month, but, uh, there’s, there’s some [00:38:00] extra small meetings we have in between just to get mm-hmm things up to speed and see, who’s gonna take ownership over what particular committee that runs within the association.

So that could be events or content or the podcast, or, um, all different, all different things are happening there. And, uh, we’re working on. How we can streamline communication because I think that’s the most important thing that’s, that’s lacking right now at the association, um, is, uh, communication of what is happening on the inside.

And, uh, there’s a lot of islands between all of these committees where community members are working, uh, and they don’t know that much about what others are doing in other committees. Mm-hmm . Um, and one of the things that I wanna reevaluate is the current website that’s being used, the platform that’s being used for the McKen association website.

Mm-hmm because that’s being maintained by the external party and [00:39:00] everything that needs to be changed. There takes a long time and everything costs money mm-hmm mm-hmm and then we

[00:39:06] Kalen: could just move that to more Ference sites. Yeah. Yeah. That should be something lighter weight. Yeah. Just have like

[00:39:12] Willem: five, five, uh, uh, content editors that are approved yep.

To make changes. Yep. And then take any contribution from community to, to, uh, to change pages and, uh, and have that refu emerged, uh, in

[00:39:30] Kalen: some way. Yep. A hundred percent. Yep. That makes a lot of sense.

[00:39:35] Willem: Yeah. And we’re having meetings with Adobe about the Magental branding. Uh, apparently does a plan in the making how, how Adobe wants to continue communicating the Magental brand, uh, which currently.

Isn’t that clear. We see a lot of different communication coming out of Adobe from different departments. And it’s not just this, not just one and this [00:40:00] Nu not one guideline that tells Adobe employees yeah. In what way they should communicate the Magental brand. And so currently, if you go to magenta.com, you’re redirected to a Adobe page that says Magento is now Adobe commerce.

And that has really angered me, um, because it’s, it’s false. And even if I talk directly to Adobe people and especially the decision makers, they’re like, yeah, that’s not the, that’s not the right communication. That’s not the right wording

[00:40:30] Kalen: or accurate thing. Is that majo Medo, uh, Magento commerce edition is now Adobe commerce edition.

Mm-hmm so I could understand the, the, the, the mix up there. Um, but yeah, the issue

[00:40:42] Willem: there is that the organization. Adobe’s such a big organization. They have a content department. Oh yeah. And a marketing department. And they, they get assigned to update a page and they’re like, oh yeah. So, uh, I, I read that magentas now Adobe commerce and they put it there and then then if [00:41:00] you wanna get that change again, you need to go through 10 layers.

Me as a community member, magenta community member need to go through 10, 10, 10 different shacks in a chain to reach their content apartment. And then they’re like, well, I’m not sure if that’s actually. I’ve read this document that says that Magento no longer is called that. So, yeah, it’s, uh, it’s, it’s difficult, but they they’re working on a plan to do that better and work more with the community together.

Um, we’re working on, on, um, uh, a better format to, for the maintenance of Magento open source for pool requests on the official Magental repository to, um, to get more influence from the community to get things changed in Magento core, um, which is, um, which is looking promising. So, uh, it’s not gonna be the Magental LTS S YESS that that we’ve been, [00:42:00] um, that was a plan, a concept that we worked on for a long time, especially together with Eric EY mm-hmm

And, um, at the time that he left it also became clear that, uh, not. Every department and Adobe signed off on that plan. And, um, and eventually they decided to, um, um, to focus on improving the workflow of contributions and, and, uh, um, giving more ownership to the community over the product in a different way than having two versions.

They basically said, if it’s so hard for us to maintain one version of magenta together with the community, then we’re gonna make it even more complicated. If we’re gonna have two versions of Magento and then find a way to, to, uh, to do that well. So they said let’s just focus on one version of the product.

Um, honestly,

[00:42:53] Kalen: that makes sense to me. I know I still don’t completely understand the short term and long term thing. I know you tried [00:43:00] explaining it to me once, but it, that makes sense to me, like,

[00:43:05] Willem: you know, it’s fine enough to, um, In the end, it all boils down to what the vision is that the Adobe currently has for open source.

And that’s what I want to get on the table. I, I wanna

[00:43:18] Kalen: see, I, I could venture a guess, but I, but, uh, I think, I think I’ve thrown enough grenades this month. I’m gonna, I’m gonna,

[00:43:28] Willem: I’m gonna hold. No, I, I just. I wanna get a, a as clear as possible picture of what Adobe wants to invest in open source and community and what the decisions are that they wanna make on, on that product and see how we can move forward together, uh, between the community and Adobe.

And, um, yeah, it’s, it’s, um, it’s a challenge for them to really oversee the big picture of community and the ecosystem and all of the actors that [00:44:00] are like the whole hosting extension vendor payment providers, all of the SaaS providers, the agencies, the merchants, the pictures, it’s such a big picture to paint mm-hmm and to make them understand what, what the total value of that ecosystem is to Adobe mm-hmm and then how that could translate into.

um, growth of the Adobe commerce product. Mm-hmm mm-hmm but yeah, it, it, it, it requires a, a good understanding and, and connection with the community from Adobe mm-hmm and, and all of the people that really had that connection with the community, talking about band marks and Eric airway, fairway, a lot of other, a lot of architects that, that were in touch with the community that left, um, she road who moved to the background, um, uh, you know, is what

[00:44:55] Kalen: is her role now?

And I was actually

[00:44:57] Willem: Sherry moved to [00:45:00] developer relationships, um, more, uh, Adobe wide. So she does that for, um, uh, for multiple Adobe products. Got it. Okay. Um, got it. So, um, Yeah, she moved a little bit more, well, little bit, she moved away from the, the Magental product and, uh, from commerce. Yeah. From commerce.

Yeah. And more into the other products at Adobe office. Got it. That makes sense. She’s still, uh, um, she’s still active in, um, in, um, keeping, keeping a finger on the, on, on the pulse, on the pulse with yeah. With her colleagues at Adobe seeing what’s going on and giving them advice on how to, uh, collaborate with the community.

So, um, yeah, I think she’s, she’s still somewhat involved in the background, but, um, mm-hmm yeah. Um, makes sense. Yeah. Uh, a lot of the, the key [00:46:00] figures that we knew from the conferences and, uh, and, and social media, they, they’re no longer in that, in that role at Adobe. So, yeah. Yeah. It’s hard to, uh, to, it’s a, it’s an

[00:46:12] Kalen: evolving very message now it’s, it’s an evolving landscape on Adobe side of things.

Yeah. Yeah.

[00:46:20] Willem: And it’s always, there’s always new people coming to fill the spots if, if someone changes positions and it’s just, it’s the nature of organization like Adobe people are more focused on, on, on their career path and they fulfill certain role. And then. They get this really good opportunity at another company.

And they feel like they they’re up to a new challenge. I want to have a change of, of scenery. Um, and that makes sense, but it’s harder for us as a community. I mean, we are we’re here and we’re staying here. We’ve been doing the Jetta stuff for more than 10 years. Yeah. And even if we do a career switch, it’s likely that we still keep doing magenta stuff.

[00:47:00] So we, we we’re still here. And then, well, this, we,

[00:47:03] Kalen: I mean, this is, what’s so cool about me, Jos is that it’s, it’s, it’s giving all of the long timers in the community, a place to really put efforts. Um, and, and like you said, hopefully this can all be one, one big happy family collaboration with, um, with, uh, Adobe and everything.

And, um, that’ll be best. I really. .

[00:47:28] Willem: Yeah, I really see it as a playground currently where we can kind of explore in what way we wanna work with the magenta product and just see if we have the space to just innovate and do have total control of the product, what happens mm-hmm and then kind of use that as an inspiration.

um, it’s hard to define now towards Adobe to say like, well, if you allow us to, to do more with the product, you will get this and this and this and this. [00:48:00] That will be the result of that. Yeah. We don’t have like a real, real, tangible, real something. You can really tell them this is the value that we will give to the product.

If you allow us to.

[00:48:11] Kalen: And by the way, as this progresses, let’s say fast forward, six months, you start to get some of those, uh, additional features or additional improvements in the, uh, fork layer. I’m not, I’m probably using that word wrong, but in the, in the, in the, as you start to build out this section of code that is different from the mirror.

And then as you start to get some traction from merchants or other areas in the community, then the conversation completely changes from, oh, can you do, can you please do this for us to, Hey, here’s a feature that’s valuable. Do you guys want it for free

[00:48:46] Willem: it’s battle test it. It’s been used by

[00:48:49] Kalen: couple. And then it has independent once it has independent traction.

And once you get a, a merchant that’s on their radar that, um, that cares about [00:49:00] that and asks them about that, that’s where the, the, the entire dynamic completely changes to where they go. Yeah. That, okay. Yeah, go ahead. Let’s do it. Um, and so I, I it’s, you know, it’s funny, it’s, it’s actually historic because the magenta community has been talking about a fork forever.

Right. And there have been different attempts at a fork, and they’ve essentially none of them have really gone anywhere, um, for, I mean, for, you know, all intents and purposes. So the fact that this is actually happening is, is pretty cool. I mean, um, just from a historical standpoint,

[00:49:38] Willem: Yeah. Yeah. And one of, one of the focuses that I’ve added to the mix now, like we, we, we started very European centered because we just, I mean, you know, the time difference between just us two is so complicated to schedule things.

Um, if you have three time zones, I now see with the magenta association, we have people from [00:50:00] AZA, Europe and America. Yeah. That’s impossible. That means the only time that I can do meetings with the association where everyone is in daytime is for me is half us five, uh, an evening. Um, then we can have one and a half hour while we can talk while, um, America has the morning and Asia has their evening.

Um, so it’s, it’s the only time that we can schedule calls now. Um, and with major west, we just, we went for, for, for velocity so we can get things we can achieve things fast. Yep. Um, and then we started to include people from more, uh, from the Americas. Um, so then we needed to move our meetings to the end of the day, so that it’s the morning for the us.

Uh, and now I’m, I’m really trying to find ways how we can reach all of the other areas like, uh, south America, people from Asia try to, [00:51:00] to that’s include more ity.

[00:51:02] Kalen: I was actually talking to somebody in south America about this who is a, you know, community oriented, um, person that, um, was asking, you know, Hey, are you getting involved?

And, you know, they were saying, well, you know, you don’t really have any, any representation from Latin America at the moment on the, on the thing. And so, um, I was thinking that would be. Um, you know, and, and, and I’m all about, Hey, you gotta, you gotta get started. We’re it makes sense. It’s in Europe. Awesome.

You guys are getting things going, but as you start branching out, um, you know, I was just say, get, get somebody like that. Or obviously there’s a number of people who could, who could fill that role. Um, whatever it looks like if it’s not on the actual board, or I don’t know how the board is structured, but if you can get people like that to get a little bit involved and have some visibility, I think, I think that’s exactly what you already said that you’re, that you’re working to do.

Yeah. But I think that that’s mostly in the messaging

[00:51:59] Willem: [00:52:00] ownership. Yeah. It’s mostly in the messaging to, to really. Um, invite people in, I mean, so many things that we do are completely open mm-hmm or I think the most transparent organization currently out there in the community hundred percent, but you can, you can just, you can join our, our discs, it’s chat.mas.org.

Um, you can see, uh, when the meetings are happening. So we announce all the content meetings and the technical meeting. We announce those on disco with the link. Anyone can join and listen in and share their IDs. Um, anyone can pick up a task on this distribution and the, the mirror that we’re building. Um, but it, I mean, to get involved with a community, you need to like step in and get.

We can’t really, I can’t pull you in to feel engaged with us because you need to, it’s like at a conference, the Pacmac, uh, Pacman principle. Yeah. When you [00:53:00] stand in a circle and you keep the circle open so that anyone that is interested can join, they can join a conversation and then they become part of it.

But so we’re not me. Mutuals is not like a closed circle. It’s very much open, but it, it depends on the person that wants to join to step into that circle and just start listening in. And then as soon as they feel like I have something, I have something to ask or something to, to contribute here. And that’s how.

I mean, I, I didn’t really get into the community. Really got the feeling that I became part of the magenta community until I did my first hackathon. Yeah. Uh, I went to a lot of conferences and I, I listened to people and I met some people, but it was hard to connect. And then the first time I did a hackathon, uh, was especially Peter up from Hans who really.

Made me feel part of, of their little team and, um, invited me in and from there I started to feel part of the community. Yeah.

[00:53:58] Kalen: And it’s yeah. And a [00:54:00] hundred percent. I agree there. I think that for particularly, if there are people that have been longtime contributors in the community and for whatever reason, they haven’t had the reason to get involved in majors.

They’ve just been busy with work. They’ve been whatever. I think that, and I think I, this is where I’m starting to see what my role can be with this whole community building thing is to, it could be as simple as being like, Hey, you know, here’s somebody in Latin America, that’s been an active contributor for a long time.

How can we plug them in? What’s a, what’s a low hanging. Where we can say, Hey, uh, it could be as simple as maybe there’s localization stuff that you guys wanna do and say, Hey, let’s just make this person assuming that they have a little bit of time. They can dedicate to it. Like here’s somebody that would make sense to plug in doing localization or, um, you know, some, some, some minimal level of, uh, I guess the way I think of it is [00:55:00] what is the, what’s the minimal level?

Let’s say, we wanna say, let’s say we wanna add a, a Latin America representative, uh, today, right? What’s the low everybody’s busy, right? Everybody, they may not have a specific thing that they want to go do a pull request for or whatever, but what is the lowest hanging fruit where we can say, Hey, can you commit an hour a month?

Can you commit an hour, a quarter to do X, X could be as simple as. I’m gonna talk about it on social media. It could be as simple as add me to the website. And if there’s anybody in Latin America who now they have a friendly face. Now they have a point of contact. Um, it could be as I think as, and then as they see representation from their neck of the woods on the website or whatever the official thing is, then I think that’ll help to build traction.

Um, mm-hmm in addition to all of the other ways that you currently have to build traction [00:56:00] it’s

[00:56:01] Willem: so I’ve also been thinking it’s so hard to classify. What, what a community member. Means like, when are you, when it’s the feeling? The, the mm-hmm, the only thing. Like you making someone feel like they belong and they are part of a hundred percent.

Yeah. Do they need to contribute for that? No, but, but how, how can you make them feel belong belonging if they, if they don’t interact or if they don’t join, join the disc or join the slack or join the conversation, then it’s really hard to really, to, to get a, get a feeling of a people feel included or not.

[00:56:45] Kalen: Um, and when I, when I had this particular conversation, I could tell it was a feeling thing. It was a, it was like, oh, so what, what do you think about ma major? Because I generally. Everybody is super excited about may Joss. And, um, and then [00:57:00] it was like, oh, well, you know, there’s nobody from Latin America on the thing.

It’s all Europe. And I could te and I understand the reasons why that’s the case. And I think what you guys were doing to bootstrap is fantastic, but I also could understand. The feeling, the subjective feeling somebody might have, who’s been active in Magento for a decade that goes, well there, like there’s nobody there.

Right. And, and so I, I’m just saying what’s the simplest way. We can add people there from different places. Um, and, and, uh that’s but I, I agree with you, it’s a subjective thing, right? Like you have a very clear objective path. If you wanna get involved, get involved. There’s no barriers. There’s no, nothing.

Just go for it. Um, yeah, but I think there, there, there’s a, there’s a feeling that people have if they’re not, if they’re not invited in, right. Like I think if somebody’s been active in a Magento for a long time, they care about it. It matters to them. [00:58:00] Let’s invite ’em in, let’s just invite ’em in whatever that means.

And I can literally be the person to do that. I can figure out how to. Invite them in whatever that means. Mm-hmm , you know

[00:58:10] Willem: what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. So it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while now. What if we can organize certain, certain meetings or, uh, actually ever since I, I mentioned this, uh, at major S uh, phai has been live streaming, all of his work he does in the weekends.

He usually works on major west on Sunday, and then that’s cool in desk. He does this water cooler where you can just, um, which is basically chat room mm-hmm and, um, he usually tweets like, oh yeah, I’m now live coding and, uh, join, join. And, uh, and talk with me, see what I’m doing. That’s cool. Um, yeah, it’s, it’s um, it’s hard to get.

To get connected with people that, that you’re not connected with. Y like [00:59:00] we can tweet, Hey, please join us. But then if someone doesn’t feel personally invited and I don’t know who that person is, how do I

[00:59:10] Kalen: reach? Well, I’m just saying, so that can li I’m just saying I can literally do that. Like, that can be my little way of helping out is if mm-hmm to the extent that you care about my feedback.

I can say, Hey, here’s somebody let’s plug ’em in. Let’s do it in a way that’s really easy and simple and doesn’t require anybody’s time. And I think will help, I think will help the build traction in different

[00:59:32] Willem: places. Yeah, I would, I would just love seeing new faces on these meetings that we have on the content and the tech, uh, meetings that we have.

Um, we’re working on the diversity and inclusion thing. I think fi I wrote a block post that’s going to be released this week. Uh, Chilan from one sub checkout. She, um, she’s been working that with fi I, um, so, um, there’s a plan. There’s a plan there to see how we can include more people. Um, [01:00:00] it’s one of the reasons I’m also very excited about New York is because I know a lot of people from, uh, Latin America and, uh, Asia will be coming there that I’ve never seen in person yet.

So, um, yeah, I wanna brainstorm with them like what people like VGA, Kalani, uh, who has so much connections, um, with, uh, with the community and Asia, uh, what his ideas are, how we can, how we can get, get people from, um, from those regions involved totally now. So it’s yeah, it’s not unwillingness. Yeah, how it’s it’s just, I’m

[01:00:36] Kalen: not difficult.

It’s no, I’m not saying, and I’m not saying it’s, it’s, it’s unwillingness by any stretch. Everybody’s busy. You’re stretched to the max everybody’s, everybody’s doing a bunch of stuff. Uh, and we can talk more about it offline. I, I basically, um, uh, have some, you know, I think that, and I think it’ll continue to happen, but I’m just, I have some ideas that I think could accelerate it.

Um, speaking of New York, [01:01:00] the official ma talk me, I, I think this might be the second ever ma talk, meet up. I think we did one at imagine it was pretty fun back a few years ago. Um, got a little bit of trouble because we overlap with some other official and they imagine stuff, but that’s okay. Um, so we have 40, like 41 people of RSV peed.

And, um, and so, and then you got anxious. Did I get anxious? I got a little, I guess I did get a little, if I don’t think about it, I don’t get anxious if I think about it, you know, are we gonna kicked out? Maybe who knows, who cares? It’ll be fun if we get kicked out or if we don’t get kicked out of the, of the bar where we’re at.

Um,

[01:01:47] Willem: yeah. So look, we, we might be moving to a different location that, uh, that can, um, accommodate more than 40 people. Yeah.

[01:01:56] Kalen: We’ll link to the LinkedIn event and you can find the location there. So [01:02:00] we’ll figure that out. We, I didn’t know if we’d have three people RSVP or what, but, so when we went over 40, I was like, okay, alright, good times.

[01:02:10] Willem: Yeah. I, I think we’ll, we’ll probably get a bit more than that even, uh, as the events grow near.

[01:02:19] Kalen: I think so, man, I think so.

[01:02:23] Willem: So that should be fun. It’s gonna be fun for sure. I’m

[01:02:25] Kalen: excited. Yeah. I’m excited about New York.

[01:02:29] Willem: A lot of west people will be represented.

[01:02:32] Kalen: Are you like six of five? How tall are you? I keep imagining what it’s gonna be like to meet you in person.

[01:02:38] Willem: I can’t tell you an American. I can tell you in European. Tell me

[01:02:42] Kalen: European

[01:02:44] Willem: meters one meter 98.

[01:02:46] Kalen: Ah, okay. Okay. So you’re almost okay, so you’re tall almost two meters. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Good, good, cool. I was imagining you cowing over me in person.

[01:02:57] Willem: I, I can adjust. [01:03:00] doing, I won’t look down on you, but, um, yeah, we, we have four or five people from hos, uh, joining the, the meet up as well.

And um, there’s gonna be four people including me from the association. So that’s also wait, dude, are you like

[01:03:20] Kalen: six foot four? Dude, you’re giant. If that’s one meter 98, you’re a giant Viking dude. Holy

[01:03:28] Willem: cow. Six foot four, two centimeters.

[01:03:37] Kalen: You’re t