Meet Magento New York 2022 - back and in-person after three years

[rsomaniadof30b]

After a break for 3 years, Meet Magento NYC happened in person, and with full zeal in New York City on September 23. It was a reunion of sorts as people could finally network in person again.  It was my first Meet Magento event and New York was a great venue that embodied the spirit of the community. With almost 500 attendees, there was broad representation, with some attendees flying many hours to attend the event. I was so happy to meet so many of our community partners, developers, and sponsors in person! 

As a Magento Association board member and Adobe representative, I was thrilled to be a part of this event.  I have worked in the e-commerce and payments space helping entrepreneurs worldwide recognize their dreams while turning hobbies into businesses.  While I have never been involved in an open-source community, I was eager to meet merchants and partners who help make those dreams come true for small businesses all around the world. The more than 35 people from the Adobe team and I were excited about the opportunity to attend and be part of this dynamic event. 

Many thanks to the team at Krish and a special shoutout to Marsha Naidoo who helped organize this fantastic event that brought us all together. It takes a lot to pull something like this off well, and Marsha and the team did a wonderful job.  I especially enjoyed all the diversity in topics and speakers that provided great education and thought leadership.

Aside from attending, I was privileged to be invited to speak as part of the kickoff keynote.  My message was that merchants have different needs at different stages.  The beauty is that with Magento Open Source and Adobe Commerce an entrepreneur can start their journey, and we can support them as they scale their business. That’s the power of our community!

As part of our continued involvement with the community, I was able to announce at Meet Magento NYC that Adobe is introducing a community-led prioritization model for the Magento Open Source code base. This model is a result of feedback from the Open Source task force and has been introduced to the Magento Association board in August of this year.  It will enable the community to help prioritize bug fixes and community features that should be merged into the code. Adobe will take this prioritization and continue to focus on the quality, merge, and release operations to increase the velocity of community-driven priorities into the Magento Open Source code base. This will ensure we address the most important needs of the broader Magento Open Source community that serves small businesses. While Adobe continues to be a top contributor to the Magento Open Source code base, the community needs everyone working together to increase innovations.  We will be providing details on how to vote for contributions and share progress on a regular basis. Watch out for a follow up blog post here on the forum under “News & Announcements”.

As a community we are collaborating to succeed together, whether it is helping smaller entrepreneurs recognize their dreams of prosperity through commerce or a large enterprise looking to deliver unified experiences and personalization at scale. It’s exciting to see how the Magento Open Source code base and Adobe Commerce collectively help developers, entrepreneurs, and businesses of all sizes.

With over 3000 extensions and 1000 active extension builders on the Adobe Commerce Marketplace, we realize it’s an important way to showcase and sell your solutions and we will continue to support this. Adobe is also a prominent contributor to the Magento Open Source code base providing most of the bug fixes and commits. We will engage with the community in a regular and transparent manner through our community hangouts, monthly newsletters and Meet Magento events. If you haven’t seen our monthly newsletters, check out the latest one here.

It was inspiring to see the efforts of our contributors and maintainers. They volunteer their time to help create a better offering for the entrepreneur or small business that is looking to create economic prosperity through online commerce. As we all work together, let us generate more interest and recognize even more contributors throughout the year.

I loved seeing the assortment of individuals who made a difference in our community including many individuals from the team at Atwix who have been leading the contribution board in the past year.  Thank you for all your time and energy. It will be wonderful to see what new faces join the leaderboard next time!

With Magento Open Source being a great place for small businesses to start, and Adobe Commerce the solution for mid-size and large enterprises, we are helping merchants of all types and sizes with one community through hard work, passion and contributions.

I am looking forward to sharing more updates with all of you. While this event was fun and productive, I did not get a chance to meet as many folks as I had hoped for. Feel free to reach out at rsomani@adobe.com.

-Ritesh