]]> Dear visitors and clients as the year approaches it’s very end we’ve crunched some interesting facts about the highlights of 2011 in inchoo. So called “Infographics” awaits to be seen.

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

]]> Happy holidays everyone. As you could notice, we have a new holiday header, new holiday wallpapers, and today we have something new. Creative sparks did their magic making us proud to present you Inchoo Snowflakes Magento Extension.

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!

]]> This post continues from the FOWD NYC 2011 – Day One post. We carry on with the presentations held on the second day of the Future of Web Design conference held in NYC.

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.

]]> Inchoo was very lucky to be at the “Future of Web Design” #FOWD conference this year in New York City and here’s what we experienced among some of the very best and talented in both web design and web development.

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

]]> For the first time ever we bring you a list of Magento blockbusters – these are the movies that simply had to be made, but those Hollywood guys somehow beat us to it.

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.

]]> Check out Magento abstract wallpaper pack by Inchoo. Featuring Magento visuals and abstract backgrounds, these wallpapers would look fantastic on the desktop of any Magento fan!

Feel free to download and enjoy

Magento Corner Dark
1920×1080 | 1600×1200

Magento Corner Light
1920×1080 | 1600×1200

Magento Flow Dark
2560×1440 | 2560×1024 | 1920×1080 | 1600×1200 | 1650×1050

Magento Flow Light
2560×1024 | 1920×1080 | 1600×1200 | 1650×1050

]]> Pop-quiz: Where can you listen to high-level Magento development lectures, experience amazing cuisine that caters to vegetarians and meatlovers alike, and then swing away on the golf course for as long as you can – all in the same day?

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.

]]> Over the last few months there was a lot of buzz when Google Plus arrived. Initial reaction was very positive and it became hugely popular over the night. Many people saw it as Facebook demise and you could see a lot fo funny videos of Google+ vs. Facebook fight. One of the avatars became quite popular at that time. The one that says “I have moved” and has Google Plus logo. Even three Inchooers placed it on their own profiles.

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!

]]> Customer segmentation is one of the most powerful tools used by marketers today. Magento offers some great segmentation options you can use out of the box with its Enterprise Edition. But, here we’ve done some of the work for you – check out the latest Inchoo Team Segmentation!

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!

]]> The city describes itself. We would like to show you an autobiography of our town of Osijek in Croatia that lives by its own rhythm. According to author, here we live in a different, separate time dimension and our own perception of the civilizational happenings within the city. This video is 100% made out of images. There is not a single “live” video shot in it. One of the national most famous studios, Romulic & Stojcic team took over 90,000 photographs during several weeks of filming.

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.

]]> As is mentioned earlier at one of the posts, Tomas, Ivica and me were “the chosen ones” to go to Magento developers paradise conference at Ibiza. So how was it? In one word – incredible. It was paradise in its true meaning.

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

]]> Three Inchooers are impatiently awaiting June 4th when they will start the journey to this years Magento Developers Paradise that will take place in Ibiza, Spain. This will be a great opportunity to meet fellow developers as we did last year and get first insight for Magento 2. Check out the interviews with the speakers.

Branko Ajzele and me had some great time last year at Mallorca, attending previous conference. It was really nice meeting all comrades and hearing their Magento stories. Branko Ajzele, our project manager and senior developer was scheduled for a lecture Clone Yourself: How to Effectively Share Magento Knowledge with New Developers where he shared tips and tricks on the best ways of training new developers and preparing them for the adventure that is Magento.

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?

]]> This is a short story of how a bunch of Inchooers attended an ecommerce conference in Palic, Serbia. It was legen – wait for it…

…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!

]]> People say that practice without theory is empty, and theory without practice is blind. Yet another example of making links between theory and practice was Tomislav’s lecture about developing a successful IT company on a bedrock of blog writing and personal employee branding. It was a real eye-opener to many first-year master’s degree students at the Faculty of Economics in Osijek. In the classroom with almost hundred students and no empty seats, Tomislav talked about key factors and decisions that took Inchoo from a one-man show to a fast-growing company with world-recognized expertise in Magento consulting, design and development.

He shed light on challenges that building a company around blog writing brings. Moreover, Tomislav emphasised the importance of focusing on a niche market, building strong relationships with the customers, and having a well-defined set of human resources practices in place. The lecture was thought-provoking and engaging, and got a very good response from the students.

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

]]> Inchoo Learning Day is fast becoming something you won’t want to miss. This time, even though it’s only our second such event, we already went international. Here is a brief story of what went on last Friday in a small village on the outskirts of Baranja.

Last Friday we organized our 2nd traditional Inchoo Learning Day – ILD2 – this is a rather new training/teambuidling/education event we organize every two months or so to have a day outside of our standard work environment, discuss some of the current topics important to all teams in Inchoo, and have fun!

This time we went to Suza, a small village in Baranja, to “Piros Cizma” restaurant (a mixture of Hungarian and Croatian names which translates to “The Red Boot” – even though there are two of those shown on their logo). We also had two international guests – Zdravko Karanovic of Basic Elements and his associate Srdjan Bajic joined us all the way from Serbia (well, they actually took less time getting there than we did).

Little did we know, when we were deciding on a date for the event, that Osijek and its surroundings would be hit by a snow blizzard on Thursday (one day before the event), making some of the roads virtually impassable.

But, hey, we’re working with Magento – if nothing else, we’re used to unexpected occurrences and random acts of God

So, we created a quick checklist of what needs to happen on Friday:

1. survive the journey driving on snow-covered roads (some on summer tires, just for the fun of it)
2. make one of the most popular Gauls jealous by eating wild boar without inviting him to the table
3. taste some nice local wines in a nearby wine cellar
4. make friends with one of the craziest dogs ever
5. get back home safely (a rather important one)

And we managed to complete all of the above. So, we could say we were quite successful.

The main part of the event was still education. This time we had two main topics for discussion, and they were:

• Git in Use – for those of you who don’t know this (anyone?), Git is one of the widely used version control system we’re implementing across the company. Mladen Lotar prepared the lecture and introduced everyone to some basic, and some more advanced usage of Git

• Project Management – Tomislav Bilic prepared a session with a lot of examples on good project management practices, team roles vs. team members and basic values we are looking to show in our everyday work – respect, proactivity and fun.

We had fun, learned something new, and gave our eyes some time to relax without staring at the screen for a whole working day. We can only advise you to do the same once in a while.

You can take a look at some images on the slideshow below or on this Flickr photostream or check out hashtag #ILD2 from your Twitter accounts. Enjoy.

]]> We’re hoping to start a new tradition with the event we organized today. 1st Inchoo Learning Day took place in Zlatna Greda, Croatia where the group of geeks (Inchooers) gathered to discuss and learn about programming best practices. The idea is simple. We will take one Friday every two months to go somewhere in the nature and spend a day working on education and knowledge sharing.

We knew it will be a fun event, but we weren’t sure if it will be as useful as we hoped. Now, few days after, things are clear. It was a great thing to have a day like this where developers will move away from computers and share knowledge between each other.

“But why don’t they do that at regular work?”, someone could ask. Of course they do. Events like this are not a replacement for education. They help, speed up and guide education that happens every day.

Topics of the 1st Inchoo Learning Day were:

1. “Introduction speech”, Tomislav Bilic
2. “Eclipse, SVN & Magento“, Vedran Subotic
3. “MVC & Magento“, Ivan Weiler
4. “Events & Observers“, Tomas Novoselic
5. “Frontend best practices“, Željko Jake Prša
6. “Debugging techniques“, Branko Ajzele

Unfortunately, most of the classes were prepared in Croatian language, so they have little use to be published. Some of them were also presented in brainstorming fashion where there is no classic Power Point or Keynote file.

Beside the educational part, we did have time for some fun where we tested our archery skills. Ana was the winner. You can check some images here on the slideshow below or directly on Flickr. Enjoy.