What is Hyvä Meetup about?
Last Wednesday, on the 19th May 2021, the very first Hyvä Meetup happened. Hyvä Meetup is your meeting place for all things Hyvä - that's the tagline. That means that it's for anyone interested in Hyvä to come together, share experiences and to enable collaboration. We want this place to have a benefit for the Magento community.
Hyvä Meetup is organised by integer_net, co-creator and main partner of Hyvä Themes. We've created Hyvä Meetup as a virtual live event in English so that a greater number of people are able to join in. That worked out really well: For this first edition of the meetup we had 217 registrations from 34 countries.
Two Presentations: Case Study & Page Builder
To make sure that people get new insights, there were two presentations during the event. The first was a case study by Ryan Copeland, Director of Foundation Commerce.
Case Study of KES Lighting
Ryan shared the story how his team adopted Hyvä Themes, what issues they faced during the implementation and also how they worked out the challenge of extensions that were not compatible with Hyvä Themes. Very interesting to see here was that the often-claimed shorter development period of a Hyvä project held true as well for this project by Foundation Commerce.
Video of Ryan's Presentation
You can access Ryan's slides here.
Making Page Builder compatible with Hyvä Themes
The second presentation of this meetup was by John Hughes, Technical Director at Fisheye. He presented his journey of making Adobe Commere Page Builder compatible with Hyvä Themes. Since Fisheye works with many merchants that run Adobe Commerce, this compatibility was crucial to John's adoption of Hyvä Themes. And so he got to work to make it happen. Currently about 95% of all Page Builder features are supported by Hyvä Themes. And in the spirit that sharing is caring: This is all part of Hyvä Themes. So if you get a Hyvä Themes license, what you need to use it with Page Builder is included.
Slides of John's Presentation
You can access John's slides here
Time for Questions
As we have seen at Hyvä Release Party in February, attendees have lots of questions and we wanted to make sure that all these questions are answered during Hyvä Meetup. So we set up a Slido page where everyone could enter questions, either with their name or anonymously. Questions referring to the presentations or the speakers were read out right after the presentations.
More general questions were addressed in a separate Q&A session with Willem and the Hyvä team. Many questions revolved around the future of Hyvä - whether it's here to stay and how it may evolve when Adobe pushes PWA Studio and maybe abandons Luma at some point.
There were so many questions coming in that this Q&A session took longer than expected.
Learnings from the first Hyvä Meetup
So this is already our first learning: We need more time for the general Q&A part at the next Hyvä meetup. Also, we saw that no one used the networking feature (which is a random pairing of one-on-one video calls). One explanation could be that whenever someone wanted to use it there was no one else available. So for the next meetup we will either deactivate the networking feature on Hopin or we will set a specific time slot in the schedule for networking.
As with most virtual event, we had a few minor tech issues but thanks to the team behind the scenes we were able to resolve them quite quickly. This event has really been a team effort of the folks at integer_net who had different roles and tasks during this meetup: from linking resources in the chat to monitoring Q&A to providing social media coverage and fixing any tech issues.
"I believe that #Hyva is the frontend that #Magento 2 should have always had." Strong words from @RyCopeland and I tend to agree. Very cool showcase at #HyvaMeetup . Good organization as always from @integer_net :-)
— Sascha Wohlgemuth (@Nomad73) May 19, 2021
I think I can speak for the whole team when I thank everyone involved - especially our lovely audience who was highly engaged, provided plenty of feedback to the speakers and helped each other out in the chat. And of course a big thank you to the speakers John Hughes and Ryan Copeland who both did an awesome job with well-prepared content that answered many questions. They didn't hold back their knowledge but shared it generously with the audience.
So what are our plans for future Hyvä Meetups?
While we haven't specified the date yet for the next Hyvä meetup, we are determined to have a next edition coming up. Our call for speakers is open so if you want to present your work with Hyvä or case study, please reach out to Andreas at events@integer-net.de. As soon as there is a fixed date, we will announce it on Twitter.
This time most attendees came from Europe. That probably has to do with time zones as the meetup started at 8:00 PM for Central Europe and it ended around 11:00 PM. While we do offer recordings of the event so everyone can watch it afterwards at their own time, it's not the same as attending it live so we may consider moving the event to a different time of day so that other folks in different time zones can join us more easily.
And that's it for now. We are brainstorming already for the next meetup and considering new topics. If you don't want to be a speaker yourself but there's a topic related to Hyvä that you would like to see addressed at the next Hyvä Meetup, please reach out to Andreas.
Thanks everyone involved in Hyvä Meetup - The Premiere and we're looking forward to seeing you at the next Hyvä Meetup!