Review: Neos Conference 2017

Neos Conference 2017 was a great event in so many ways!

It already started with the Neos sprint throughout the week leading up to the actual conference. Florian, Nico, Sebastian and later Bastian worked with many other community members on Neos, especially the new React UI, and helped prepare the conference.

On Thursday five Sandstormers attended the Domain-Driven Design Workshop by Mathias Verraes and came out amazed. Bastian, Nico, Eric, Robert and Michael agreed that it was a great workshop and have already started applying concepts from it in our projects. After the workshop we got together for our traditional pre-conference dinner. This time in Scottys Bar which was a great location with very nice food! 

Like in the past years we attended the conference with our full team including both students Alex and Leo.

During the conference Sandstorm was present both on and off stage. Apart from our logo which could be seen in a lot of places thanks to our sponsoring, 

• Sebastian had a talk about the new React UI,
• Eric was on stage to receive the Neos Award, 
• Bastian and Chris held lightning talks, 
• Tobias acted on behalf of the Neos Team,
• Manu directed the live stream while Alex or Leo operated the camera

and the other team members were present throughout the audience.

During breaks someone of the Sandstorm Team could always be reached at our booth to talk to. We are especially proud of Alex and Leo who were eager to explain Exply (see further down or at exply.io) to interested conference attendees. As they spent a good part of March helping to finish Exply for the Neos Conference they did an amazing job!

First of all: congratulations to everyone who submitted a project for the Neos Award! It was an awesome lineup and probably really hard for the Jury to choose the winners.

Our own submission bebe-dresden.de - a project which we worked on during the current school year with students of the Bertolt-Brecht-Gymnasium Dresden did not win an award.

However, we were part of two other projects that did receive an award:

1. Swisscom Mailer by WebEssentials won an Excellence Award - we  implemented the Go component for the actual mail assembly and sending (Case Study on neos.io)
2. 1&1 Partner Portals by networkteam, netlogix and us won the Gold Award - together with the other 2 agencies we implemented 6 partner portals for 1&1 using a 2-Stack CMS approach with Neos and a custom Java application. You can watch the show case presentation by Matthis Radke of networkteam on Youtube.

We are extremely proud of our achievements and are looking forward to more great Neos projects in the future!

Two well kept secrets of ours are our two available software products Exply and Sqill. We used the conference setting to show friends and interested community members both products and talked a lot about technologies and our experiences while developing them.

Exply is an analytics tool to visually and interactively analyze data. It is available as a Beta Plugin from the Atlassian Marketplace to analyse JIRA and Tempo project data. More information and use cases can be found on exply.io.

Sqill is a tool to sign PDF documents. Once you sign up you can send a PDF to the Sqill App for signing. A simple use case with a simple app. We use Sqill to sign all sorts of documents such as travel expense reports, documents, letters, and small contracts.

We are so proud of what the Neos community achieved with the very first Neos Conference!

Our involvement with the Neos Conference 2017 really began with the info that there would not be a next Inspiring Conference. From the start we worked with sitegeist to organize the conference, especially in the role as a link between sitegeist and the Neos Core team. We made huge progress during the Neos sprint in Hamburg in November 2016 when Gina, Lisa, Lea, Robert, Tobias and Sebastian created the Master Plan for the conference. We helped to prepare the official communication and social media marketing, selected talks and speakers together with Robert of Flownative, designed and ordered Neos swag together with Ralf of Core4, and became a premium sponsor of the event.

Before, during and after the conference we provided helping hands to the organizers during the location setup, goodie bag preparation and technical setup.

The livestream of the conference which can be viewed on Youtube (Day 1 and Day 2) was prepared and executed by Sebastian, Manu, Leo and Alex and was very well received.

We also had the honor to take on an official Neos Team role when Tobias handed the recognition badges to Josef Willkommer of TechDivision for organizing 5 years of Inspiring Conference (or Flow3 Experience as it was called in 2012).

Of course "after the conference is before the conference". So we are not idle but rather gather feedback and prepare a retrospective for Neos Conference 2017. Meanwhile the planning phase for Neos Conference 2018 has already started.

Of course we have already bought our tickets for next year and look forward to see you at Neos Conference 2018!

All photos are a courtesy of Daniel Lienert.