Vendure Developer Day 2023 Recap
The idea for Developer Day started in our Discord server, when a couple of community members suggested an in-person meetup. We decided to make a full-day event out of it, and with less than two months to prepare, we got to work organizing a venue, speakers, and a full program! Honestly, with such short notice we weren't sure what we would be able to put together, but the way things came together exceeded our wildest expectations! From the world-class speaker lineup, the venue and catering, to the sheer enthusiasm of our community.
The State of Vendure
I opened the proceedings with a look back at the Vendure journey so far, charting our milestones from the first commit in 2018 to the present. Actually, the story started much earlier than that, with my first static brochure sites and then forward to my monstrous PHP4-era custom shop with its 5,000+ line "functions.php" file. After that came the spark that grew into the Vendure project, followed by our first users, first live websites, first major version and forward to the present day.
With the release of Vendure v2 earlier this year, we laid the foundations for our long-term vision as a platform on which you can build any kind of commerce application. But what's still missing? I outlined a couple of key areas that we are already starting to address: first is the ecosystem - plugins and integrations. This is a key point when choosing a commerce platform, and one where we can do a lot better. Secondly, while our core data model and low-level APIs provide support for a huge range of commerce use-cases, we need to provide higher-level guides and examples on how an implementation would look in the real world.
The high-level targets for the next versions of Vendure are twofold: make Vendure easier to build on - improving & evolving APIs, expanded CLI workflows, more extensibility points, and easier to use - further improving the UX of the Admin UI, eliminating frustration for admins, supporting common flows like duplicating products.
Plugins & Integrations
How can we improve our ecosystem? Well, we already do have quite a rich set of official and community plugins. It has just been difficult to discover them. All of that changes with our brand-new Plugins & Integrations directory. This is a central directory where you can quickly find high-quality plugins from our core team, trusted partners, and the wider Vendure community.
With the release of our new directory, I also announced two brand-new core integrations: Sentry and Stellate.
Sentry is an open-source application monitoring platform which can track & report runtime errors across your stack, from storefront to server. Our new Vendure Sentry Plugin allows you to get rapidly set up with Sentry and start gathering insights into exactly what errors are occurring in your app, which API operation was called, and which line in your source code is responsible.
Stellate is an edge cache for your Vendure GraphQL API - reduce the load on your Vendure server, bring response times down to as low as 50ms, and proof your store against traffic spikes. Our Vendure Stellate Plugin will take care of ensuring your cache is never stale by reacting to changes to products & collections and automatically purging only the affected records from the cache.
Both of these plugins have been extensively tested in production and can immediately benefit virtually any Vendure application.
The Future of Vendure
Our CEO David delivered the second keynote, this time covering our ambitious plans for the coming year. Vendure is evolving from being simply an open-source project to becoming a fully-fledged open core company which consists of the open-source core plus a range of commercial products and services built around it. The trick is to balance these parts in such a way that everybody wins: our community enjoys a well-supported, sustainable set of open source packages, while our customers and partners benefit from a richer ecosystem that allow them to bring their vision to reality in a minimum of time.
To achieve this goal, David outlined three strategies we will be rolling out over the coming year:
Vendure Hub
The Vendure Hub is a our upcoming marketplace for high-quality plugins and integrations. Building on the foundations laid by our new integrations index announced above, the Vendure Hub will also support paid plugins, allowing our partners to distribute and earn from their work. Our goals with the Vendure hub are to provide a revenue stream for both Vendure and our partners as part of our vision of a self-sustaining open core business, as well as to allow our users to focus on their core features rather than building everything they need from scratch.
Planned for Q2 2024, the Vendure Hub will launch with a selection of first-party plugins built by the Vendure core team as well as a selection of third-party plugins from trusted partners. A key focus for us will be quality over quantity - all third party paid plugins will be reviewed by us, and will be subject to a strict QA process including automated compatibility tests with new Vendure versions.
Vendure Cloud
With Vendure Cloud we will solve the pain of DevOps once and forever with our own cloud solution. Building on the knowledge we have gathered over the years of running Vendure in production, we will be offering two products: Vendure Cloud PaaS (platform as a service) and Vendure Cloud SaaS (software as a service).
With Vendure Cloud PaaS, you'll be able to simply connect to your existing repository and deploy your Vendure server in a tailored environment exactly matching your needs. No more complex configurations for high availability, auto-scaling, backup schedules, connecting services and configuring pipelines. Think Vercel, but for your Vendure server. This is ideal for use-cases that require a high level of customization.
With Vendure Cloud SaaS, you'll be able to spin up a Vendure instance via a web interface and configure things using a low-code/no-code approach. This is ideal for brands that have basic requirements and want to focus on building an outstanding storefront.
Best of all, since the SaaS product is built directly on top of the PaaS platform, it means that you can start simple with SaaS, and later when your business grows and requirements grow more complex, you can move over to the PaaS, take control of your own repo, and continue building without limitations!
Our estimated launch for Vendure Cloud is Q4 2024.
Vendure Partner Program
With our new Partner Program we will build a network of skilled and innovative partners around the globe. We explored the idea of a partner program last year but soon realized we were missing something. The interest was there - we have over 70 partners already lined up! - but we lacked the resources on our side to build a program that truly fit our vision of what such a program should look like. In our view, a partnership is more than just a badge - it means providing real mutual value to the benefit of our partners and the broader Vendure community.
As part of our new Partner Program we're also planning the Vendure Academy which will consist of high-quality videos for developers at any level; interactive workshops to help you apply what you learned; and interactive coding challenges that test your skills in real-world scenarios.
Our estimated launch of our Partner Program is Q3 2024.
Our Speakers
As well as the keynotes delivered by David and I, the Developer Day featured presentations from leaders in both the Vendure developer community as well as the broader tech industry. Here's an overview:
Laszlo Kesmarki & Karoly Pakozdi
Laszlo & Karoly work at Goroid, a venture studio that helps startups build outstanding products. Goroid made a bet on Vendure way back in our pre-1.0 days, and in that time has gained a lot of experience with building highly custom & complex commerce apps at massive scale. Of particular interest were the insights shared by Laszlo in building out the new platform for Munch, a rapidly-growing surplus food platform serving over a million users with tens of thousands of outlets across multiple central & eastern European countries.
Miroslav Jonas
Miro works at Nx, where he helps companies manage and scale their codebase using the power of the monorepo. His talk focused on how Nx can be particularly useful with full-stack code bases as in a typical Vendure project - where you have a server, multiple plugins, a storefront and ui extensions all located in a single repo. Many of our developers already use Nx, but Miro covered aspects that you might not yet have got to grips with, such as graph analysis, distributed task execution, and code constraints. In closing he teased what a potential Vendure Nx plugin might look like... watch this space! His slides are available here.
Daniel Biegler
As well as contributing to Vendure core & our Remix storefront, Daniel works for Directus, an open-source backend platform for building any kind of data-driven application. He impressed upon us the importance of owning your data - a value also shared by Vendure itself. Moreover, he demonstrated that having full ownership of your data unlocks some really amazing opportunities. In this case, he did a live demo where he connected Directus directly to a Vendure database and exposed Vendure data in a CMS-like way to allow content editors to build rich landing pages.
Michael Hladky
Michael is the founder of Push Based, a consultancy that works with some of the best-known tech companies to optimize their applications. He has spent a long time diving deep into what makes an application fast, and we were happy that he shared a small part of his knowledge with us! He gave a primer on the main metrics that make up Core Web Vitals, as well as plenty of practical (and hard-won) tips on how to speed up any storefront.
Max Stoiber
Max is the CEO & co-founder of Stellate, a global edge cache for GraphQL APIs. Fittingly, on the day of the release of our official Stellate plugin, Max gave a real-world demo of not only how fast the Stellate cache makes your storefront, but how easy it is to set up. Indeed, he did so live on stage - adding a Stellate cache in from of a live production Vendure server API, and showing how response times were immediately and drastically reduced!
Miško Hevery
Miško is the CTO at Builder.io and the creator of the Qwik framework. Qwik is a groundbreaking new technology which is uniquely well-suited to e-commerce applications, where speed and start-up time are paramount. We met a couple of years ago at a conference in Berlin and after seeing one of his demos, it was clear that Qwik would become an important technology for commerce.
Joining us remotely from California, Miško guided us through some mind-blowing demonstrations of new programming patterns that are enabled by Qwik's advanced code splitting compiler, as well as answering questions from our audience.
Our Community
Last but not least, it was the Vendure community which really secured the success of our inaugural Developer Day. Despite the short notice we were blown away to learn that developers had travelled from Germany, Portugal, Hungary, Poland, the UK and even the USA just to attend our event.
In my years of running the open source community via GitHub, Slack and then Discord, it has been one of the pleasures of my role to be able to interact with interested and enthusiastic developers from all over the world on a daily basis. But chatting on Discord is a world away from actually meeting in person. Gathering together in the same room, sharing the day, hearing about what amazing things you are all building with Vendure - it was unforgettable!
And since we were in Vienna and it's December, we of course had to visit the famous Viennese Christmas markets! For many of you this was your first time in Vienna, and we were happy that we could build not only new professional connections, but new friendships too.
