The agenda is rich and divided in three tracks:

• Technology Track – unfortunately, this one is not for me any more. I can’t myself fully follow programming trends, so I would mostly just blink if I attend these sessions. However, it is good to know that Imagine has a lot of good sessions for developers, and not just business people. I expect Inchoo will have more crew next year.
• Business Track – is oriented for consultants and merchants
• Partner Powered Track – will be oriented for partners. I’m very looking forward to be at Annual Magento Solution Partner Leadership Summit (I just remembered I need to find my invitation).

Besides of fun simply by going there, there are some goals I set for myself to achieve at Imagine:

1. For starters, I’m really looking forward meeting some of our US clients face to face. Skype video call was most advanced form of meetings with them so far. It will be great to shake hands.
2. Check out and get insight of what X.Commerce really is. I don’t know about the rest of you guys, but almost a year passed since I heard this term for the first time and I still don’t know what will it be in reality and what opportunities or threats are there for us. I read that we will have a revolution, but even after reading the post, I am not sure where’s the catch.
3. Check out where Magento is heading and evaluate how much will it be affected by eBay and the whole X.Commerce thing.
4. Evaluate Magento’s strategy for partners.
5. Reconnect with the guys from other Magento partners like WebShopApps, Blue Acorn, Classy Llamas, Gorilla Commerce and others…

See you in Vegas. You can reach me via Twitter on https://twitter.com/#!/tomislavbilic or SMS me to +385.91.577.1025.

Cheers!

——

EDIT: This was, as most of you accurately guessed, an April Fools’ Day joke. Thanks to everyone who joined in with their comments and for keeping the joke alive for some extra hours last Sunday – it was a rather obvious one (after all, who would simply share a cheat sheet, right? ), but we thought it would give you a couple of laughs. Happy certification, everyone!!!

——

Here at Inchoo we have always taken pride in sharing our knowledge of Magento with the rest of the community, so this is only a continuation of a long-lasting tradition.

There’s been quite a few articles written on the whole certification process, one of the most recent ones being Ben Marks of Blue Acorn sharing his thoughts on how to become certified - but this – this is something completely different!

We have 4 certified developers today (haven’t used the cheat sheet ourselves yet), and with the results of our recent investigation (and with special thanks to all of you guys out there who were flunking the tests only to get us this invaluable info), there’s much more to come from us, and hopefully from all of you, our loyal readers and followers.

Have you just started poking around Magento but find it a bit overwhelming to pass the exam?

Or are you a Magento Solution Partner with little to none dedicated Magento developers, paying for your partner status simply because you can and outsourcing the development to other companies? You were probably worried when Magento announced you’ll need to have certified developers on board – well, worry no more – with our ultimate cheat sheet you can have your community managers pass the exam in their first try! Add a couple more people to the mix and you’re golden!

Discovering the patterns

This cheat sheet was prepared after we gathered the details about questions from 42 exams taken worldwide (it took quite an effort getting all these developers sneak in those mini cameras to capture the questions). Not in our wildest dreams did we expect to find clear answer patterns.

You can imagine our surprise when our consulting partner, a tenured professor at the University of Osijek’s Department of Mathematics, told us that to a math-trained eye the answer patterns were so obvious it would take a high-school graduate several hours to understand them and pass this exam.

The exam apparently uses one of the most common math concepts – prime numbers – as the pattern to answering the questions correctly.

How come this was missed by the Magento Certification Board, you may ask? Well, call us conspiracy theorists if you will, but this can’t be a pure coincidence, so we somehow feel this was done on purpose, to allow the developers around their companies (who have the inside info) to pass the certification with flying colors.

Well, guys – the jig is up! Now everyone can become a Magento Certified Developer, and here’s how:

What do you need to pass the exam?

1. Exam voucher number

You have to purchase a voucher to be able to register for the exam, so once you make the purchase, you will get what appears to be a randomly generated voucher number, but what it actually represents is the first clue, or the key to solving the test, even if you have virtually no prior Magento experience.

The last digit on the voucher number is the one that’s going to help you pass as it will correspond to the actual exam you’ll be solving. It contains the hidden answer to the first exam question and after that it’s all a smooth ride. It’s all explained in detail in the actual cheat sheet below.

2. Prime numbers

Well, you probably remember all about the prime numbers from your math class, right? I thought so – in a nutshell, a prime number is the one that only has two divisors – number 1 and itself – so, prime numbers are 2,3,5,7,11,13,… the list goes on indefinitely (but you’ll only need first seven primes to pass the exam).

And that’s all the info you need – so, how does this actually help? Using your unique voucher number and primes with a little help from the cheat sheet, you can get all the answers right.

The cheat sheet revealed

So, without further ado, the cheat sheet together with instructions can be downloaded right here.

Download the Magento Certified Developer exam cheat sheet!

We actually gave this cheat sheet to one of the developers who initially flunked the test, and she was happy to share her thoughts for this article:

“Guys – this is incredible! Works like a charm! Ok, there was quite a bit of counting involved, but it also helps you not to look suspicious finishing the test too quickly. I deliberately answered several questions wrong and passed with a stunning 64/70 score! Thanks a lot for the cheat sheet, and I can only hope more people will benefit from this! Love Magento, love the community!”

April Første, Magento Certified Developer (Denmark)

So, there you go – what are you waiting for? Get Magento certified! And yes, you’re welcome!

This time, it was a truly international experience as we had Inchooers from both our branch in Serbia and Lyssandro Reis, our Operations Manager for Australia/New Zealand, joining the Osijek crew. 

We went back to the roots, to where it all began – Zlatna Greda, a cozy little village in the middle of Baranja, and their Eco Centre where we had our very first Inchoo Learning Day.

If you’re new to Inchoo and not familiar with the concept, Inchoo Learning Day is our educational/teambuilding activity when we take the whole team out of the office for a day to talk Magento and have fun.

A warm welcome back

The crew of Zlatna Greda tourist agency really did their best to make us feel at home again. Our old friends, a doe called Malena and a mare Zenta looked happy to see us again. This time Zenta even introduced us to the latest member of their family – a little yearling called Zora.

After we had some nice breakfast and a quick coffee (or two – c’mon, it’s a bunch of developers out there, after all), the stage was set for a relaxing day out in the nature.

Reward Points, Translations, APIs and all that jazz…

Of course, this event is not called Inchoo Learning Day out of sheer fun – we always kick the day off with some lectures prepared by our own developers. This time, the topics were:

• Magento Enterprise Reward Points Inside Out – Sasa Brankovic
• Magento Translations – Advanced Tips&Tricks – Ivan Galambos
• UI Designer meets Frontend Developers (and everyone survived ) – Lyssandro and the frontend crew
• Magento SOAP API – Darko Goles
• Introduction to Phing – Branko Ajzele

The lectures were very useful, but they sort of flew by as the lunch time drew near and we quickly dropped the Magento topics to fully enjoy one of the favorite meals for most of the people in this region – chobanac (shepherd’s stew) – this one was prepared with deer and wild boar meat and it was amazing – hats off to the chef!

Old fishermen’s route

Another part of the event, after the great lunch, was a bit of treasure-hunt-like trekking combined with a boat ride which took us on the route of old fishermen who used to make a living in this area.

We had to find hidden clues to advance to the next stop before getting to the boats that led us to the treasure – a genuine elixir of life.

The boat ride ended up being the funniest part of the whole ILD as the second group’s leader lost his footing and splashed into the water. Fortunately, no fish were harmed, but some Inchooers might have suffered serious injuries laughing their faces off

The entire event was a success and everyone went home for the weekend relaxed and with new stories to tell…

Special thanks go to the crew of Zlatna Greda and, of course, Nandino Loncar who organized the whole event.

You can catch a glimpse of the atmosphere by taking a look at some photos below… or check out #ILD4 on Twitter…

Opposite of strong is weak organizational culture, and it has a negative impact on employees motivation, productivity and overall organization success. When I started working at Inchoo HQ, it was obvious that a growing business as it is, has it’s own specific marks and customs that design its culture. Although you can determine and analyze a lot of levels that make some organization’s culture and measure its strength from many different aspects, here are a few characteristics that I saw as creators of organizational culture at Inchoo.

1. Green

Every business chooses its home color. But you need to ask yourself is it really representing your work and everyone involved in it? Well, Inchoo actually is green. Green means a desire to be safe but it also means growth. Green is calm but powerful, energetic but balanced. Everyone is very specific and different, but together in some particular way – they are developing and pursuing ideas to grow, while constantly finding a new common balance. Green is of course all around company interior.

2. Coffee

Developers drink a lot of coffee – that’s something everyone knows. It’s once said that behind every successful man or woman is a substantial amount of coffee. It might be true, but at Inchoo when you go for (another) cup of coffee, you are reaching for a dose of energy, thinking through what you’re working on, or increasing an idea flow with your colleagues. It’s not just the coffee as a drink, it’s coffee as a common habit that brings working level up.

3. Breaks and free time

How do you spend that 15 minutes, or 30 when you have a break from your work? It’s a good culture when you do something relaxing, but what’s making you more close as colleagues and what will have a good impact on your work. Inchooers usually go to near by coffee place, each having its own sort of break-drink Most of the time, it is the time voluntarily invested in something related to work.

4. Knowledge Sharing

This is something most companies fear – sharing what you know with others, even customers. But if you really care about quality and delivering your promises to your customers, you have nothing to be afraid of, but to be happy if you serve your customers and public by sharing what you’ve learned. Knowledge sharing is as effective to your customers, as it brings back a great feedback to you and your organization reputation and perspective. The most important way of knowledge sharing in Inchoo is of course via our blog.

5. Inchooers as comic characters

Inchooers have their own comic characters. Well, not all of them since there are some brand new faces on the team, but that is something very original, specific and unique that differs Inchooers and empowers their identity. You can see Inchooers’ characters all over the blog, Facebook fan page and on a lot of other material in the firm.

6. Jokes and fun stuff

Do you encourage laughing and making jokes on team meetings? Well you should, since it’s important for organizational culture to have their internal stuff going on and talking about. You don’t want your employees be that strict and making barriers to their creativity. What you want is a good atmosphere that brings lightning in dealing with projects, customers, problems and decision making. At Inchoo you can see just that.

7. Team Building

Do you do team building and why you do it? Because it’s trendy, you heard it’s a good practice or do you actually see the benefits of team activities within your organization? Can you, as employee or team leader make an atmosphere that almost every coffee break or pizza in the office brings team together? And do you plan team building as something with purpose that people want to be a part of? Inchoo has its Inchoo Learning Days to have fun and share knowledge. Along with that, if you are a good team leader you might be able to help creating a good atmosphere so every coffee break, pizza or burek in the office does a bit of team empowering.

8. Values

This is an important, if not a crucial part of organizational culture. What do you and your employees rely on when problems come, when people change and industries face crisis?  Value system comes from a leader but it needs to be spread throughout your company so you can survive, grow and make better everyday decisions. Projects come and go, but values keep all factors of your business together. Inchoo started to work on a project that brings other IT companies from Osijek area together, focused on delivering values to entire community (Osijek Software City). You see, values are what your company relies on: it means getting back to its fundamental reasons of existence and it will make sure it actually does a good job through a longer period of time.

Do you think about improving your organizational culture so your work quality and productivity increases? How do you do that?

Please click on the image to see it’s full potential:

Inchoo 2011 InfoGraphics

We wish you all a very
healthy, joyful and successful 2012! See you there!

Your Inchooers

Demo

Update: As you requested, we added a few “live” variations that you can archieve with this extension to Snowflakes Demo.

Screenshots

“Look Ma’, it’s snowing on frontend!”

If you feel cold from all that snow, add some stars instead…

…or write your own message to customers

Configuration options are located in
System -> Configuration -> Inchoo Snowflakes Config

Download

Just download InchooSnowflakes.zip, extract files following directory structure, reload cache and let it snow!

Christmas Day
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In our first post we covered all of the presentations we attended and we’ll carry on in the same rhythm presenting you with the:

Day Two

Pith, Passion, and Productivity: Pillars of a Successful Design Career

By none other than Cameron Moll.

Pith
“When I start editorializing the things that other people are doing, I lose my pithyness.”

How do you make a name for yourself as a designer?
“Write. Write with pith, authenticity and passion.”

Passion

Cameron’s Colleseo Poster and Authentic Jobs both started out as pursuits of passion.

“Do and write about things you’re passionate about.”

Productivity
“We have a strategic plan. It’s called doing things.” – Herb Kelleher (co-founder of SouthWest airlines)

Look for ways to get the most out of your time.

Design Principles: The Philosophy of UX

By Whitney Hess was another inspiring speech.

When talking about UX, we usually talk about user experience and visual design. But good design does not equal good experience! So, design principles are there to provide consistency, constrains, shared vision and objective evaluation.

Visual Design principles:

• Contrast
• Emphasis
• Variety
• Balance
• Proportion
• Repetition/Rhythm
• Movement
• Texture
• Harmony
• Unity

Experience design principles:

1. Stay out of people’s way.
2. Create a hierarchy that matches people’s needs.
3. Limit distractions.
4. Provide strong information scent.
5. Provide signposts and cues.
6. Provide context.
7. Use constraints appropriately.
8. Make actions reversible.
9. Provide feedback.
10. Make a good first impression.

You should read Whitney’s slides in detail.

The Future of CSS

By David Shea, was a treat after another. David started with a satisfying graph of browser market share showing IE decline and Chrome’s rise on the desktop while the mobile landscape was not that definite.

Here are some highlights:

• Most importantly – Optimize CSS for browser perfomance
• nth-selectors
• First, last of type
• Forms CSS manipulation
• Vendor prefixes – Dropping them or not?
• Color modes, background property…

David continues with more CSS magic but it’s too intensive to list them all here.
Why don’t you check them out here.

The Future of Mobile UX

By Steve Fisher a funny Canadian guy. His speech about The Future of Mobile UX, hit right on the spot. It was about, you guessed it, responsive web design.

Steve opened with some great humor featuring iMac spoof: “”For the letter ‘A’, I press it once. For the letter ‘Z,’ you guessed it, I press it 26 times.” The new MacTini

And finished with deep thoughts: “The web is not about specific devices. The web is not fixed width.”

“Mobile design isn’t just about shrinking it down”

Wondering what happened in between? Steve’s slides can be downloaded here.

Responsive Web Design and Embracing the Unknown

By Aaron Weyenberg. David Lynch: “It’s such a sadness that you think you’ve seen a film on your fu**ing telephone.” http://j.mp/t8oZX1

A few years ago web designer’s biggest worry (except IE6), was whether to design for 800 or 1024 pixels wide screens. Today, there are dozens of screen sizes, browsers and platforms. And there are probably more to come. We need to embrace responsive web design philosophy.

“There is no Mobile Web. There is only The Web, which we view in different ways. There is also no Desktop Web. Or Tablet Web. Thank you.” – Stephen Hay via twitter

“If responsive web design was a political philosophy it would be socialist. If it was a religion, it would be agnostic.”

Aaron slides can be downloaded here.

Summary

There are few buzzwords that were repeated throughout the conference: content, mobile, UX, responsive. These are not just buzzwords, we actually need to take care about that now and not in some distant future to be forgotten. Optimizing your “One Web” presence is not such a big deal if you take care of it the right way on time.

However none of the attendees/speakers mentioned e-commerce in context where things are inherently more challenging especially when it comes to Magento. This is something that we’ll try to catch up with by creating a Responsive HTML5 Magento theme in the near future.

A few people already asked us: “So, did you learn something new on the conference?”

No, nothing especially. But that was not the prime intention we have books and tutorials for that. BTW we’ll have all of those presentations packed in a hybrid presentation/slides video for download also so we can catch up with what we’ve missed or couldn’t attend to.

Thanks Cat and Ryan, that’s really indispensable

The real value we got from this conference is the current and future perspective of the “One web”, and on top of that to feel the energy and enthusiasm of the community that is pushing the web towards new boundaries.

Finally, we’ve met some interesting people on the conference, among the others: Jens, Ilina, Zoran, Rob and Ben from SparkBox, Ditte and Emil from SnowFire, Gregory from ThomasNet…

On behalf on the entire Inchoo Team, Hrvoje Jurišic and Željko Prša the lucky ones who attended the conference say a big “Thank you” to all of you involved with the organization and also to our new acquaintances for sharing their enthusiasm and opinions.

Hope to see you someday soon on another conference soon

Cheers.

Future Of Web Design: New York from Scott Coello on Vimeo.

This was our first FOWD conference and being in NYC for the first time as well we were still settling in with the impressions of the Big Apple when we arrived at the “New World Stages” where the conference was held.

Day 1

OMG it’s full of people

If we counted right, there were over 400 people at the conference attending two tracks. Designers, web developers, business owners where all there for the conference waiting for the introductory speech on the Track 01 to begin.

Ryan Carson

From Carsonified opened the conference with a short introduction about what to expect from the presentations.

Kevin Systrom

From Instagram shared his story first about the success of the company that made a simple photo sharing app with photo filters perks. A simple idea that is at the core of their enormous popularity among iPhone users and what’s interesting is that their web site is just one HTML page used to display their 250 million photos and everything else is within their mobile application. They built a successful business without having a regular company web page.

Instagram Statistics:

• 250 million photos in the bank
• 12.6 million users
• 1.5 users per second gets registered
• Hosting costs: “2 really nice cars”

Kevin’s presentation was inspiring and we’ve learned a few tricks for fast page loading that he revealed. Hint, check what’s Google doing on Gmail’s login page to see where they took the inspiration from.

After Kevin, Carsonified officially launched their Treehouse site dedicated to Web Design, Web development and iOS learning.

Brandon Mathis

Gave a great speech titled “Sass & Compass: The Future of Stylesheets Now” explaining how to turn CSS coding into more than just bearable experience by using Sass: syntactically awesome style sheets. Easier to read, easier to update. It is a scripting language that is interpreted into CSS, and allows us to use variables, math, nesting, mixins and more… Brandon hit the spot by calling it “a layer of empathy between the designer and the stylesheets.”

You can see his presentation on speakerdeck.com

The Myths of Mobile Context

By Josh Clark was next busting those myths with vengeance. Very interesting speech, demystifying some of the usual beliefs about mobile in general.

One usual belief is that mobile user is always in the rush. Not true. Mobile is on the couch, in the bed… According to Josh, 40% of people admit they are using their phones in the bathroom. 60% are liars.

Mobile is not less, mobile is more. There’s camera, GPS, gyroscope and voice.

“Your mobile site should probably have less stuff than your desktop site right now, not because it’s mobile but because your desktop site is probably full of crap.”

There it is again: Mobile first. Start with mobile first, to narrow your content to what’s really important.
To summarize it:

• mobile != rushed
• mobile != less
• complex != complicated
• tap quality > tap quantity
• focus for ALL platforms
• no such thing as mobile web. There’s only one web.
• don’t think app: think service.
• metadata is the new art direction.
• Content like water

You should download Josh’s presentation here.

Super-Powered CSS3 Animations

By Nick Pettit was next presenting what kind of animations can be achieved with CSS3 alone and was particularly aimed at Web developers and Designers new to the CSS3 animations presenting how they can be easily achieved and best used.

One great point was that even though there are desktop tools for creating animations with CSS3 they are creating a “Flash-like” experience while what we actually need is to use CSS3 animations in the context of the Web app not just as standalone animation.

Unfortunately his presentation is not available online at the moment but he did refer us to this helpful tool for creating CSS3 animation online: Ceaser.

HTML5: Smart Markup for Smarter Websites

After Lunch and uniSessions Aaron Gustafson was up on the stage. His presentation was orientated to clear up the mess with all of the different how-tos and tutorials around the web and just focus on what HTML5 really is and how to use it most effectively in your daily work.

In summary:

• How to switch to HTML 5
• Redefinition of elements – strong, em, b, i, hr
• New York Times HTML organization case study
• Accessibility and semantics – Using “role” attribute
• Expansion – Front end form validation for example

One other interesting note was about the “time” tag that was omitted from official documentation in favor of the “data” tag but was continued to be used by developers making it again a candidate for the official release. Quote: “Time was back the other day: on Wednesday”.

You should definitely go through the entire presentation here:

After a break that followed Aaron’s presentation we were finally presented with the “Grablet” that was mysteriously lingering around the New World Stages. It turned out to be a unique iPad “one-hand holder”. The Web Font Awards Ceremony followed where they announced the winners wich you can find here: http://www.webfontawards.com/.

The Power of Side Projects and Eccentric Aunts

By Tina Roth Eisenberg was next.

Tina’s speech about how side projects are important for growth and inner satisfaction was inspiring and full of ready-to-go catchy phrases we need to share with you:

• “I don’t distinguish between my personal life and my work life. I do at work what I love to do.”
• “We rely too much on statistics…We as the human race have lost our ability to trust our intuition.”
• “If an opportunity scares you, you need to take it.”
• “Don’t complain, make it better.”
• “Make time for side projects, and treat them like real client projects.”
• “Stay away from people who are fond of disliking things. Be around people who like things.”
• “Haters gonna hate”

That was it for the day and we headed back to the surface from New World Stages to hit the NYC streets only to come back the next day for the day two.

Note:

We took some pictures our selves but sitting far from stage and having only smartphones in the dark we suggest you take a look at the these set of photos as a better reference. The photographer was shooting the “Snowfire” team at the event and we were also lucky to meet the team as well.

Read next:

Day Two

Check this list out and let us know which ones would you like to see most – we might prepare a sneak peek preview for your eyes only.

Any resemblance to real persons, software platforms or development companies is purely coincidental and could easily be traced back to your own overexposure to Magento development projects.

Each of the blockbuster titles links to its Hollywood predecessor on IMDB.

• Citizen Roy
• One Flew Over the eBay’s Nest
• Saving Private Sales
• To Kill a Core Module
• X.commerce Now
• The Magento Connection
• Invasion of 3rd Party Extensions
• The Good, The Bad and The Ugly – a story of CE, PE and EE – randomly listed here, of course
• Catalog Price Rules of Engagement
• Open Source Code
• Solris
• Harry Potter and the Order Management
• X-Men – an hommage to Magneto – Magento’s evil twin brother
• Eternal Sunshine of Magento API
• Requiem for the SOAP
• Lock, Stock and a Static Block
• Sleepless in Culver City
• You’ve Got Transactional eMail
• Alan Storm of the Century
• FarGo
• Magento, Inc.

And a special Magento trilogy everyone’s waiting for:

• The Lord of Magento: The Fellowship of Developers
• The Lord of Magento: The Two Editions
• The Lord of Magento: The Return of EAV

So, there you go – which ones do you fancy most?

Enjoy and feel free to share some of your own ideas for new blockbusters, let’s see what else can we come up with.

Feel free to download and enjoy

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Magento Corner Light
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Magento Flow Light
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The answer is clear – only at Inchoo Learning Day! This traditional event took place for the third time in its brief (but already famous) history last Friday, with all the Inchooers leaving behind the comfort of the office chairs and their favorite coffee maker to change the scenery for a while.

Inchoo Learning Day is a day when we move away not only from our office, but leave the city altogether and take refuge somewhere in the middle of Baranja, a small but beautiful area just north of Osijek.

ILD combines brief, straight-to-the-point lectures (where we share some of the recent projects and know-how among the teams) with some outdoor activities of moderate difficulty (this is software development company after all).

So, let’s take a closer look at what was going on last Friday.

Let’s talk Magento, Symfony and Mobile

• Tomislav started by taking us on a journey through the first three years of Inchoo, with an eye out on the plans for 2012 and beyond, and was later joined by our CTO Branko Ajzele who spoke about his new role in the team. During the presentation the new team members were surprised to learn how some of their colleagues looked very differently only three years ago.

We’re not naming names here, but let’s just say that the amount of experience a Magento developer gains at Inchoo can apparently be easily measured using a simple scale

• Darko, who many of our loyal readers recognize as The Symfony Guy, explained what this framework is all about. As a member of products team, he also joined Ivan to present one of their recent projects – the Divine Office Hub.

• The Magento part of the lectures saw another Ivan (Weiler) demystify Magento payment gateways, while Tomas gave everyone some insights into some advanced caching techniques – all of you Magento developers out there know just how important these topics are.

• At the same time, Toni and I were checking out a trial version of Salesforce as we’re considering using it as a new CRM solution, and the products team joined forces with our Italian guest Mauro Dalu to iron out some plans for the future.

So, it was an eventful first half of the day, but we were eager to bid farewell to the first venue and drive towards the “main event”, which is just one of the many names developers use for “lunch”.

For the second part of ILD we moved to Golf & Country Club Zmajevac – yes, there is actually a golf club very near Osijek. After enjoying a great lunch, which was a very traditional meal rather unique in these parts of the world – roasted lamb under a bell (vegetarians also had something really nice on their plates, but who actually paid attention?) – check it out.

You better crouch, Tiger!

Afterwards we decided to step completely out of our comfort zone and take our chances at a very atypical sport for everyone – golf.

There are actually only five holes on this course, but the thing we were aiming for was the driving range – and that’s where all hell broke loose. Now, you’ve probably heard of some guys called Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods, but Tomas Novoselic, Stanislav Mihic and Ana Gabric are some of the names you’ll be hearing a lot about in the future, if they decide to pursue a new career – we’ve seen some real rough diamonds out there.

As for the others, well, we have to be honest – balls were flying around, moles were under some heavy artillery, and, most importantly, everyone laughed their socks off.

We have enough footage for a season-long of bloopers on the Golf Channel (you can actually expect to see these on InchooTV), but we also witnessed some really nice long drives from our developers.

You can check out the pictures from this ILD on Tomislav’s Flickr Photostream or check out #ILD3 hashtag from your Twitter.

However, we are recognizing a trend where those same users are now putting their profile pictures back and continuing to use Facebook like nothing happened. For those traitors, we made this avatar. It would be fair if they would now wear it at least the same time as they wore “I have moved” one. Enjoy!

Yes, you already met the Inchooers, you got familiar with some faces on our team info page, but now it’s time to dig deeper into what we’re all about.

So, without further ado, let’s move on to Inchoo Team Segmentation.

Girls vs boys

First of all, yes, we’re mostly a bunch of geeks, but we do cherish our own geekettes, especially since there are so few of them:

Facial hair

Now, moving on to attitudes towards facial hair – we don’t adopt a strict facial hair policy at Inchoo, so some of the team members do like to show off, and you can try to guess who they are – hint – there are some pictures/videos available on our team info page

What’s a geek(ette) without their gadget(te)?

Smartphones have really upped the ante for someone to deserve the full bragging rights of being called a geek – and as we’re constantly having Linux vs Windows vs MacOS debates, what’s more charming than seeing a couple of developers arguing about Android vs iOS?

And still, there are some who are steering away from all those touchscreens and prefer to feel an actual keyboard under their fingertips.

So, let’s check out Team Inchoo smartphone usage stats:

Summertime, and my haircut is easy

With the recent heat waves came the need to cut one’s hair shorter than usual, but we still have some team members who are on the fence as to whether to cut their hair short or start preparing in time for the cold winter ahead.

Some, on the other hand, have the luxury of not having to worry about this at all

So, there you have it, part 1 of Inchoo team segmentation. Now you know more about us. Would you like to learn more? What are some key things you’d like to know before you start sending us free stuff?

Do you track this type of information about your own customers? If not, better start gathering them, otherwise you just won’t know who you’re dealing with.

All the best for your summer vacation from all of us at Inchoo – and don’t forget to visit Croatia at least once this summer!

In case you choose to work with us some time, we hope you will come for a visit and enjoy your time here.

SlowCity – Osijek – Timelapse from Romulic & Stojcic on Vimeo.

Some of the members traveled by plane for the very first time so it was interesting to watch their facial expressions during the takeoff. We met lots of great people, including Tsvetan Stoyhev, Thomas Slade from Blue Acorn, Myuselim Myuselimov, Josh from WebShopApps, guys from Magento core team and many others.

Organization of the conference was pretty much flawless. I enjoyed my stay in the hotel, the catamaran ride, organized visit through the old town, clubs, and free drinks everywhere.

The most interesting topics on the conference were Magento 2 and eBay’s acquisition of Magento. In most of the lectures, speakers were referring to what can be expected in Magento 2.

• Extensive official Magento documentation
• jQuery instead of Prototype
• Better model architecture
• Improved theme fallback system
• Multiple DB support (Oracle anyone?)
• …and much more.

They told us that the current under development version of Magento 2 is already 20% faster than latest stable version of Magento. I was personally really impressed with what I heard, cause I never expected this much effort and enthusiasm to improve core things. They really do know community’s problems and they are working on solutions.

Other products including Magento Mobile and MagentoGo were also presented along with some impressive statistics.

To conclude, we’re looking forward to the release of Magento 2, we can feel another eCommerce revolution is on its way

We do not have a speaker this year, but we are sending more menpower: Ivan Weiler, Tomas Novoselic and Ivica Tadic. Enjoy your time guys. You deserve it.

How about you dear reader? Are you attending Magento Developers Paradise this June?

…dary!

A team of 8 went on an ecommerce conference E-Trgovina 2011 organized in Palic, a beautiful resort on the Palic Lake in Serbia, only 2 hours drive from our offices in Osijek.

This is fast becoming a tradition for us – since 2009 we haven’t missed this conference as it is conveniently located, there’s a bunch of geeks we can get to know, and we’re getting out of office for a change.

The conference itself is a platform for most of Who’s Who in Serbian ecommerce to showcase their products and services, network and share some of their experiences of running web-based businesses in the region.

Among 300+ participants, we met some really interesting people, so a quick shout-out to one of them who we spent most of the time with, Nebojsa Pantic – he was the one who coined the phrase from the title – in his overview of the conference he called us “Magento beasts from Croatia” – so there you go…

We also met some ex-Magento developers, but we witnessed an interesting phenomenon – all of them were making some strange sounds, had some eye twitching issues and were for some reason trying to make us switch back to osCommerce

Now, to the fun part – in addition to the conference itself, the resort around Palic Lake is a really beautiful place, with a fairytale-like atmosphere. It’s great for long walks, runs or rides along the lake shore or parks, and to top that off, local cuisine is extraordinary (trust us, we know good food when we see it) and you can really kick back and relax there.

We can’t wait for the next year’s conference, and in the meantime, you’ll be seeing several Inchooers at Magento Developers Paradise in Ibiza this June, so better come prepared!

This wasn’t the first time Tomislav played the role of a guest lecturer. Many professors at the Faculty of Economics appreciate his expertise, entrepreneurial spirit and willingness to give back to the community. During the past eight years Tomislav was invited on many occasions to be a guest speaker for courses in IT and general management. Besides, there is a growing interest in Magento development among students, so we hope to see Tomislav and his team as the leading lecturers in Magento workshops at the Faculty. Don’t worry, we’ll keep you posted about this great synergy between practice and theory