Launching Magento Cloud in Vegas
A Selfie-mentary about my first Imagine conference
TL:DR; My selfies didn’t win the ginormous TV, but I finished the 10k run and we launched Magento Cloud.
This is a story about setting ambitious goals to challenge you and make you grow. I set three big challenges for myself for my first Magento Imagine conference, and striving to achieve these challenges unleashed great rewards beyond what I had expected, even if I didn’t win a flat-screen TV.
Challenge #1: Run to the Hoover Dam
When I learned I would be attending Magento Imagine, the main annual event hosted by Magento Commerce, I decided to sign up for the 10 kilometre “Imagine a Big Dam Run” that is organised as a community event the day prior to the main conference. 10k is a real challenge for me — I had to train for months to gain the confidence that I’d actually cross the finish line, and the run was actually longer, and harder, than expected. I had to take motivation from some of the more experienced runners to keep going.
I was at Imagine with my company, Platform.sh, to participate in the most significant product announcement Magento have made since they were sold by Ebay eight months ago. Magento were announcing the launch of an ambitious cloud offering for Magento merchants, based on my company’s technology. Nobody outside of a tight circle of partners knew this, though, on the day of the run.
The run was an out-and-back-again course; we’d run to the Hoover Dam, spend a moment gawking at its scale and pondering the achievement of such a thing, and then run back.
Participating in the run was a great decision that already started paying off during the bus ride to the site. I met some fascinating people, like the Gene team who were also launching a new product, and whose character and charisma would get featured in the Magento highlights video (see below). My running partners on the way to the dam were Magento CEO Mark Lavelle and Strategy Dude Mark Lehnard, the very people who had been driving the Magento Cloud launch. We enjoyed the mutual suspense of the impending announcement, still unknown to most of the other runners, and we definitely helped each other keep going with the run, which somehow seemed even longer than advertised. This moment was captured nicely by the conference photographer (see below, far left).
I also got to spend some time running with Scott Dahlgren, a former colleague, whose Blackfire.io product is the code profiling tool in Magento Cloud. He too was relishing the secrecy and suspense of the upcoming announcement, and without his encouragement, I would have struggled to finish the run. Thanks, Scott!
Challenge #2: Launch Magento Cloud
For Platform.sh, launching Magento Cloud is a big deal. Every bit of the technology that we’ve been developing over the past three years is at play inside of the Magento Cloud product, from the fast-cloning on-demand development environments, the triple-redundant and highly scalable production clusters, to the accounts management and help desk solutions that we use for our own Platform.sh customer base. Working with Magento over the past months in preparation of the launch is easily the most exhilarating and challenging project our team has undertaken, and we arrived in Vegas already quite proud of the way we’d come together as a team to deliver this solution.
We brought 8 people to Las Vegas, and for the keynote and big announcement we sat with the team from Blackfire.io. Our collective hearts were pounding much like the drum corps that was the opening act for the keynote. Only after the announcement, when I went to congratulate Mark Lavelle on the keynote address, did I see the photo of us from the Hoover Dam run on the big backdrop screen for the keynote presentation. I know a selfie opportunity when I see one!
Challenge #3: Win a Ginormous TV with most popular selfie
One of the sponsor companies for Magento Imagine, Robofirm, was running a competition: whoever took the best selfie featuring their robot mascot would win a ginormous TV. Challenge accepted! I used the selfie-challenge as a way to meet people at the Magento Imagine conference, and even though my selfie wasn’t selected as the winner, and I won’t be taking home any 65 inch TV, I’ve made many new friends to whom I am bound in eternal selfie-dom. Here is a selection of the selfies (each one is worth the TV in my opinion).
One final treat awaited me; the day after the conference, the utterly excellent Magento marketing team published a highlight video which perfectly captures the energy of the conference, and lavishes praise and admiration on my efforts as a Selfie-mentarian. See below.
