OpenGento is a french speaking community of Magento developers that was founded in 2015 with the purpose of promoting the Magento e-commerce platform, and to be a point of contact for developers that want to share and discuss all things Magento.
Together we have organized many events: One conference, four get-together weekends (three in Toulouse and one in Auvergne (somewhere near Le Puy, also known as the Magento Mordor)), we have organized hackathons and shared ideas and code. Most of all, we have spent days and nights not talking about Magento.
While the initial goal of the association was to gather Magento developers and promote the usage of Magento, we now see more and more members criticize it. Magento 2 performance is the best subject you can pick to make everybody troll in the OpenGento Slack. Some members have even completely stopped working with Magento.
We initially all gathered around Magento and we went beyond.
The reality is that we did not gather for Magento. We gathered because of it. We were not trying to improve it, we wanted to improve our experience with it. The fact that you can criticize Magento, the decisions that were made and even decide to stop using it without having to quit the association is for me a great thing.
So why are we still together? What do we talk about ? We talk about Magento. But more in an Alcoholic Anonymous way:
– Hello, my name is Matias and I work with Magento.
– Hello Matias, welcome to OpenGento, the Magento Developers Association!
We talk 90% of the time about Magento, we come to the Slack to complain, share our pain and sometimes we share some good things about it.
For example, during our last hackathons we created a lot of cool things:
- A cryptocurrency: the MageCoin intended to reimburse the technical debt
- Opengento_Dontworry : A must-have module to fix all the known issues
- NoGento : How to remove Magento from your Magento ecosystem
- A makefile to get the best performances from your Magento 2.x (less than 3ms of TTFMP)
We are not Magento fanboys. We will never tell you that dealing with the Magento 2 checkout was the best experience we ever had as a developer, but we will talk frankly about what we like, what we don’t like and why.
More seriously we are a team of passionate developers who sometimes hate Magento but cannot live without it. In the association some have contributed greatly to Magento, do talks to major events and even develop useful projects such as:
- Opengento_GDPR : A module helping with GDPR compliance
- Flyimg fork for akeneo : avoid image synchronization between your Akeneo and your other applications, including Magento and do image resizing with rich URLs
- Presentation from the one who we do not speak of @ PHPTour 2017
We are not a Magento association, we are a Magento developers association. If you think the best for you is to stop using Magento, we will support you. OpenGento is all about love.
And do you want to know the best part? No one ever got banned from OpenGento.
I wish you a Merry Christmas,
Matias, proud member of OpenGento
To become a member: https://opengento.fr/
Twitter: @opengento