Meet Magento Croatia 2018 is proud to welcome Piotr Karwatka, co-founder and CTO of Divante. He’ll be joining us with “Open Source, eCommerce PWA for Magento2 based on Vue.js” presentation. As we’re all aware by now, Progressive Web Apps are the future default, so in his presentation, Piotr will focus on showing how Progressive Web App works and why Vue.js is one of the best frameworks to be chosen for building them.
Piotr is active on his Medium account, so be sure to follow him for the latest Vue Storefront news! But before that, enjoy this interview with him!
Hi Piotr! I know that this may be the hardest questions, but could you tell us something about yourself?
Hi Maja! Sure, it’s a pleasure I can have a speech at MMHR, and thanks for having me in this interview 🙂
I’m the co-founder and CTO of Divante. I was into programming from early 2000; first working on Windows-based apps (C++) and then the Web. Divante is growing rapidly (+40% a year) so among last 10 years I was in charge of almost every role starting from a developer, PM, HR, Sales 😉 Currently, as we’ve got 150+ employees, I can focus back on what I love most – product development. Last year I started Vue Storefront Open Source project and I believe that is the reason why I’m here. 🙂
Since 2008 you are the CTO of Divante, and since last year you are working on developing first eCommerce PWA. How it all came to be? What was the deciding factor in your business life to go down that path?
Yeah, there is a saying:” years are short, days are long”. And I must say it’s true; you have no idea how quickly it just went from the time we started Divante to this. We created a company because we wanted to build great products. We started working together with the second co-founder of Divante, personally my brother – Tom – since 2000. We created a lot of Windows-based apps back then. Then we moved to the Internet, web 2.0 (do You remember it? 2005?), creating and selling some startups. A lot of fun. Then we decided it would be good to get more professional.
We started Divante for building cool products. We started with some knowledge management tools, video-streaming (before it was available for free on Youtube 😉 ) – in parallel doing some eCommerce sites. eCommerce stream was the one which was growing most. We used to work with Magento since 2010. Vue Storefront was kind of – back to roots – setting back this product-based pilar along with Open Loyalty – our second, open sourced products.
I must say it was a great decision. The company is flourishing – building the products and providing expert consulting services. And it’s just kind of a beginning for us!
A warm welcome to our first confirmed speakers at #MM18HR! 🙌@shaneOsbourne, @piotrkarwatka, @jissereitsma, @lotar_vk, @wsakaren and @mbalparda!
If you too would like to share your #Magento and #eCommerce knowledge, apply to our Call for Speakers at https://t.co/a6VmjQI3xi pic.twitter.com/sYFq4c6i2L
— Inchoo (@inchoo) July 9, 2018
What was the thought process behind the idea of Vue-Storefront?
The idea was based more on our needs as a software house than PWA movement itself. I mean – at some point You could hardly find any talented frontend devs willing to work with huge monolithic platforms. Headless approach – where You have two separate software stacks (backend vs frontend) makes a lot of sense. So we went this path to improve the developer’s experience. Of course, it improves the user experience a lot – by providing much faster UI, Offline support, Home screen install on mobile devices. Basically, I see PWA as a future for most of business apps. It was an iterative process we came to this point.
From the beginning we thought it must be open source – we must involve the community to help us as the project is really broad. And this is how it’s started. Exactly one year ago – around 15th of August, there was the first commit pushed to our Github repository. 🙂
For those who will not be able to participate at MM18HR, what would be the key points of your presentation?
I would focus on showing how to build apps with Vue Storefront. Showing the developer’s experience, architecture, and some live-demo. I’ll try to get a little bit into tech details to show the audience how Progressive Web App works and why Vue.js is one of the best frameworks to be chosen for building them. 🙂
Join us at Meet Magento Croatia 2018, see the rest of the speakers and their presentations, or if you are more of a contribution-type-of-person, join us for Contribution day!
The post Piotr Karwatka from Divante as a Speaker at #MM18HR with “Open Source, eCommerce PWA for Magento2 based on Vue.js” appeared first on Inchoo.
