Recap of TYPO3 Developer Days 2024

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At the beginning of August, it once again was time for the TYPO3 Developer Days in Karlsruhe. Not my first (actually, my sixth) Developer Days, but I'll share my experiences here regardless!

Recapping 3 days worth of things is already quite long, so I will not talk about each session that I attended in detail. Each day includes a list of the ones I've attendd though.

Arrival

I started my train journey to Karlsruhe from Rosenheim on the 31st at around 3PM with two colleagues from in2code, Luis and Florian. Ready to handle anything in terms of delays, after my last train desaster in June we got into the train and unexpectedly: Everything went fine.

Of course, in typical DB fashion, our ICE from Munich was not our actual ICE and rather some replacement service that voided our reservations (but thankfully also everyone elses) so finding a seat was not a problem at all. After about 4 hours we arrived pretty much on time at 8PM in Karlsruhe, checked in to our hotel and enjoyed some dinner and drinks at Kühners Wirtshaus.

Day 1

I don't think I got in a lot of sleep that night, excitement and anxiety might have gotten to me a bit, but at about 8:30 in the morning we made our way to the event venue taking a short stroll through the woods.

After checking in and greeting the first few people on site, it was time for the event kickoff and Keynote by Benni Mack, asking the important question if CMS' are still needed with the rampant growth of AI (and yes, they are).

My session

With the keynote being over, with just a short break, it was time for my very own session: Migrating from jQuery - Core Journey to Vanilla JS. I've been part of the Core Development team for just above a year, and at some point I slid into the whole "refactoring jQuery to Vanilla JS" rabbit hole, taking on large refactorings. I talked about the strategies and tools we employed during what's already done, and how much is left until jQuery is fully gone from the TYPO3 Backend.

You can find more information on my talk right here, including all links and slide downloads.

Thanks to everyone who attended my talk and gave me feedback, it's really appreciated, and I'm glad so many of you enjoyed the insight I gave you!

Contribution Night

After the sessions concluded for the day, it was time for the Coding Contribution Night! I didn't really came with some specific Core Development topic prepared or anything, actually something way more interesting.

As a quick recap, I was a participant of the first TYPO3 Surfcamp in April of this year (read my recap here), at which we grouped in teams and built websites that are supposed to be examples/presets for one of the key features of TYPO3 v13, Site Sets. While we were at the event, we had development servers that we were able to deploy our changes to, so non-developers were able to interact with what others have built too.

After the event, these development machines were shut down, which made continued collaboration a bit harder. We still continued on our project (as finishing a whole website in 5 days with people you just met is an almost impossible task) and we needed our designated project manager, Myrna, to review these changes.

So, for this Contribution Night our goal was to get the DDEV setup running on Myrna's Macbook. And to give a report on that, we managed to do it! It might sound simple at first, but we had some setup issues, combined with some project issues that got us into a bit of a stumbling, but we resolved them.

Talks I attended

Day 2

A day full of talks awaited me!

The day started off with my colleague Florians talk on the strategies of the TYPO3 Marketing team that have been employed over the passing year and things that are still to come. In an impressive feat, Florian managed to prepare this talk on a whim after Luisa (his partner in crime for this talk) turned sick at the start of the week (in case you read this, we all missed you a lot at the event, Luisa!).

Following up, Jigals talk on the little gems in TYPO3 v13! Suprisingly, the room was packed full. The pavillon already has a bunch of seating options, but with the amount of people coming, we basically made an additional row of people sitting in front of the first-row desks.

Afterwards, it was time for another talk of a colleague, this time Daniel. Daniel talked about teaching kids programming in elementary school, using LEGO building kits. He talked about why he started this and the steps involved to getting it going, as well as how the children participated in the lessons and were eager to learn and do more and more.

Sebastian Bergmann of PHPUnit fame also was at the event, and equipped with two talks, I attended the less technical one on Friday, giving a bit of a recap on PHPUnit history, talking about the things that changed in versions 10 and 11, as well as giving some insight into the changes coming with version 12.

Oliver Haders talk on securing TYPO3 Web Applications was probably one of my favorite talks of the event, explaining us the very serious topic of application security in his humorous ways, including a lot of audience interaction too!

The final talk of the day was Beyond Code by Phindiwe Nqanqaru. She talked about BabesGotBytes, a non-profit in South Africa, empowering in and teaching girls and women about tech and programming.

I must say, the addition of the Beyond Horizons category was great, showing us all those great initiatives on how single people and groups help others to get to learn and grow in the field of technology and I'd love to hear about even more different projects at other TYPO3 events in the future.

Talks I attended

Day 3

I overslept...and missed the first two slots of the day. But, final day for me and time to get in the last few talks before heading home!

My day started with the talk about Responsive Images by Helmut Hummel, showcasing the new extension topimage, which offers a new way of configuring responsive images declaratively in PHP.

Following up, the talk about making a simpler, more accessible web by Christian Heilmann. I absolutely share this sentiment (considering my website is simple and accessible!), and the talk showed the audience all the things they don't have to build themselves because browsers became incredibly powerful compared to the olden days of the internet. This also was the first talk that I have seen that featured live transcription.

Next up was Jochens talk about FrankenPHP. I meet Jochen quite often at Community Sprints, and I already got a personal presentation of FrankenPHP and its cool features last year, but I decided to attend the talk to see how it developed since and what Jochen learned himself over this timespan. And even while it's not production ready yet, there are some cool prospects with being able to potentially bundle PHP websites in single executables for easy shipping.

Talks I attended

Verdict

The Developer Days were as awesome as always! The talks were varied and there were many interesting topics, I especially enjoyed the non-TYPO3 "Beyond Horizons" category, giving us insight into more societal topics outside of our sphere.

My favorite talks this event were:

All-in-all an event I can always recommend to anyone old and new in the TYPO3 space. If you want to learn new things about TYPO3 and the web the DevDays are the right place for that! Can't wait for next year already, where the event will take place in Karlsruhe again on 7th to 9th August 2025!

I swear I'm not late with this, I forgot I had this post sit in my drafts for over a month...

Thanks to my employer in2code GmbH for allowing me to participate at this event on work-time!