Recap: TYPO3 Developer Days 2019 in Karlsruhe (Germany)

This year we, i.e. Christian (Hellmund) and Christian (Spoo), were again present at the TYPO3 Developer Days 2019. Those who still remember our recap from last year may also remember the comparatively many negative aspects, of which we were fortunately only able to find two this year.

The T3DD19 took place in the AkademieHotel Karlsruhe. The positive first: The location impressed with good food in the restaurant, as well as a lot of space inside and outside - to sit, work and exchange with others. Additionally, there was a bowling alley in the basement, as well as always enough freely available drinks during the sessions.

Now for the negative points: Unfortunately, the first floor lacked power outlets to recharge devices between sessions. Only in the rooms on the 1st floor enough sockets could be found. The largest room was used for sessions and the remaining open rooms were assigned to their own areas (Core-Team-Room, Speaker-Room, Quiet-Room and TYPO3.org-Team-Room). And: Again this year there were massive problems with the internet connection. The WLAN was able to manage the large number of devices without any problems, but unfortunately the line behind it regularly collapsed under the load.

Despite a Unitymedia employee who immediately arrived (#TechnicianIsInformed), this unfortunately remained the case. And the mobile network was not really usable inside the building either. Both aspects that create rather semi-optimal conditions at an event for developers.

Now to the important topics of T3DD19: the talks and workshops. The program this year consisted of sessions at three different levels of difficulty: Beginner, Advanced and Pro. This classification not only made it easy to create individual schedules, but also to know from the beginning what depth of material to expect. Important topics for us were among others "Headless CMS & TYPO3", "Tuning the NGINX - or how to make your website faster", "Performance profiling with Blackfire.io" and "Frontend tests with Codeception".

On the topic "Headless CMS & TYPO3", Artus Kolanowski and Susanne Moog showed in 45 minutes which possibilities already exist to use TYPO3 with on-board means (with the core) as a headless CMS. Of course, they briefly explained in advance what "headless CMS" is in the first place, what is still missing in the current implementation and what we can expect in the future.

Here you can find the slides of the talk "Headless CMS & TYPO3":
https://speakerdeck.com/psychomieze/headless-cms-t3dd19

Performance is a very important topic on the web. After all, nobody wants to run a site that takes forever to load and only spits out the content of the website in bits and pieces. Currently we use Apache as web server for our projects. An alternative to Apache is nginx and at the T3DD19 Frank Berger showed how you can get a lot of performance out of it with small changes to the configuration. The most fascinating thing about his talk was the fact that with the help of his changes he was able to boost the nginx webserver running on a Raspberry Pi from a few hits in 30 seconds to almost 6000 hits in 30 seconds.

Frank's slides can be found here:
https://speakerdeck.com/foppelfb/tuning-the-nginx-or-how-to-make-your-website-faster

This session was by far the longest with a total duration of 4 hours (!). Benni Mack demonstrated in great detail how to use Blackfire to profile even complex TYPO3 projects and measure their runtime behavior. The commercial Blackfire supports the analysis of the code execution time as well as the number of executed database queries. Blackfire is installed as a PHP extension and also provides a corresponding wrapper for CLI applications, which enables an analysis.

The results of the analysis can be visualized, for example as a call graph, and shared with colleagues in order to work together on improvements.

Who does not know it? Even a small change in a project can lead to dramatic display problems on a website. In order to detect and fix such problems before the go-live, there are frontend tests. Christian Keuerleber differentiated between monitoring and behavior tests. He used a demo setup to show the differences between the two types of tests. He also gave a small insight into the possibilities of the testing framework Codeception.

Here you can find the slides of Christian's talk:
https://www.slideshare.net/Kabarakh1/frontend-testing-with-codeception-160912248

Unlike last year, this year the focus was again on the TYPO3 community and socializing. After countless reviews were made and new patches for the TYPO3 core were written during the coding night on Friday, the big social event took place on Saturday. Whether outside on the terrace of the restaurant or inside with music, on the bowling alley or in the countless other rooms - the evening offered many possibilities to exchange ideas about TYPO3, working methods or simply privately.

But not only the social event invited to exchange: The numerous breaks between the sessions, the dinners or the breakfast also ensured an all-round successful exchange within the community.

The personal conclusions are certainly very similar in part, and yet we both also had different experiences at the TYPO3 Developer Days 2019.

Christian Hellmund

Due to the classifications of the sessions, it was easy for me to pick out the talks that suited me. In addition, there was enough time to be able to work on new projects of my own. But I was also able to use the Coding Night productively this year and so we could release a new version of our oauth2-extension. Furthermore the website of the TYPO3 Camp RheinRuhr got an upgrade to TYPO3 v9 and could be played out productively directly.

But for me it was one of the best TYPO3 events in the last years, just because of the general atmosphere, the location and the great exchange within the community.

Christian Spoo

After last year's experience, I was very happy to see that the community has become much more professional. It's great that this year we had a nice example of an event that can also inspire community members who are enthusiastic about technically challenging topics. The fact that TYPO3 is now becoming more and more standards-compliant (meaning the PSRs in particular) and thus interoperable will make our lives much easier in the future.

Nevertheless, we are all aware of the fact that we have to take along and develop those users who are perhaps not yet technically up to date and, for example, still do not use Composer with TYPO3. Here the TYPO3 project, the association, the TYPO3 GmbH and especially the community will have to prove themselves.