Topics covered included TYPO3, Neos, Flow and Agile software development practices including Kanban, Scrum and Management 3.0.
One of the goals of the conference, says Jon Bowers, Sales & Marketing Manager at Web Essentials, was to “spread TYPO3 in the region by delivering content that improves individual's, companies' & TYPO3's & Neos' competitiveness.
Now that we at Web Essentials have a lot of TYPO3 and agile experts, we want to share that with Cambodia. It’s really great to see other local companies aspiring to global standards and industry methodologies so that Cambodia as a country can grow skills that can be exported, without having to export people.”
The conferences are part of Web Essential’s drive to consolidate tech development knowledge in Asia.
“Since most TYPO3 related conferences are held in Europe, there are very little TYPO3 events in Asia.” says Bowers. “We wanted to create a great opportunity for our friends and colleagues from abroad to come here and see what we do, while growing and strengthening the local community as well.”
The two-day conference featured presentations from renowned international speakers from 14 different countries as far as the US, Australia, Germany, Switzerland, China, Japan, Singapore and further. Some of the speakers included Kiro Harada, Joshua Partogi, Mathias Schreiber and Aske Ertmann.
“Kiro Harada stands out for me,” says Bowers. “He worked for Toyota, the birthplace of Agile. He gave us a really good understanding of where some of its practices came from. The idea came from the design of a loom machine - which is so far from software development - yet the principles carry on to this day, which is fascinating.”
The conference was followed by a day of sightseeing, then a student event where over 300 young Khmer students learned about the realities of working in web development. The 24th and 25th of August saw the first Scrum.org Certified Professional Scrum Master Training ever in Cambodia.
The sense of community was what pushed the conference beyond the traditional learning experience.
“All speakers and participants were amazing,” says Web Essentials' Ward Claes. “It was like a group of friends coming together to openly share all their best ideas. It seemed that after the first day everyone knew each other’s first name, so we hope that many long lasting relationships have been made, one of our other aims of the conference”.
Social activities during the conference days included a meet up drink, a dinner cruise on the Mekong complete with traditional Khmer music and dancing sponsored by DKD, a Grasshopper Adventures bike ride exploring rural Silk Island, and a highlight for many was undoubtedly the much-Tweeted 40-person Khmer bbq party feast, complete with beer towers taking pride of place in the center of the table. Mathias from TYPO3 surprised everyone at the end by generously footing the bill.
Although with only 88 attendees, the Web Essentials team has been very pleased with the outcome.
“We would have been happy with a few more attendees but our focus has always been to facilitate an intimate atmosphere ideal for networking and valuable collaborative idea sharing. And we believe that worked out well.”
The organisers stressed that this conference would not have been possible without the support of their Gold Sponsor: Sitegeist.
“Their early support provided us with the confidence to go ahead with the conference.” says Bowers. “We could not have delivered without them.”
We can probably conclude the conference with a Tweet from Mathias Schreiber posted after his return from Cambodia where he mentions the inventor of TYPO3:
