In this episode of MageTalk, Willem and Eric discuss the current state of the Magento community and the future of the platform. They talk about Eric's role at ShipperHQ and his return to the Magento community after working outside of it for a few years. They also discuss the evolution of Eric's role from UX designer to driving force behind PWA Studio. They touch on the role of the Magento Association in bridging the gap between the community and Adobe, and the importance of collaboration and empathy in moving the platform forward. In this episode, Willem and Eric discuss the upcoming Meet Magento UK event and Eric's keynote speech. They emphasize the importance of storytelling and the need to document the history and stories of the Magento community. They also discuss the positive vibe and mindset that the community should adopt, as well as the potential of Magento as a platform and the importance of choice and competition in the e-commerce market. Eric also shares his role at ShipperHQ and the value it brings to merchants in terms of shipping optimization and customer experience.
Takeaways
Willem (00:00)
And we are live. Welcome to MageTalk season 3, and you can consider this the reboot. I was lucky enough to inherit MageTalk from our founding fathers, Philip and Kalen. And yeah, from the capacity of Hyvä Themes, I'm very eager to...
talk about what's going on in the Magento community and connect with people in the community and just talk about what's going on right now and how we envision the future of Magento. Today, I'm talking with Eric Erway and it's an honor to me. It's someone I think that has had a major impact on the Magento community. He...
Willem (00:57)
more or less took over from Ben Marks who used to be community evangelist and in a bit of the same capacity Eric represented Adobe. Both represented Magento to Adobe and represented Adobe towards the community. You were our bridge and I had the pleasure of working with you in the Magento Association where we were both...
board members until you left Adobe, I think two years ago. And yeah, I'm just really stoked to talk to you and just chat about how life is and what you're up and about right now. Welcome, Eric.
Eric Erway (01:46)
Thank you, Willem. Thank you so much for having me. If I could say one thing, it's just, it's good to be back, honestly. It's good to see you. I'm so happy being part of the community again. And I've had so many opportunities, even in the past couple months, with my new role at Shipper HQ to really reconnect with the community, starting off with Meet Magento Florida, which seems like a while ago, but it was just a couple months ago. And really reconnecting with those at Summit and Shop Talk.
You know, we've got a we've got a big event coming up here at Meet Magento UK, but you know, it's it's more than just the events It's really getting back to the part that really like really got me going every single morning and Yeah, I couldn't be happier to be back in the community could be back happier to be back here and made shock And so I appreciate you appreciate you having me
Willem (02:35)
Well, thank you for pushing me because we said we would record an episode and many months went by and now we just decided in the middle of the day, let's just do it now because there will be an excuse always not to be able to record. Of course, the time difference is a bit of a challenge, but yeah, I'm thankful that we're doing this now.
Eric Erway (02:51)
Yep.
Willem (03:02)
You just said you're now working for ShipperHQ, which of course has really strong ties to the Magento community. Jo Baker has always been a really strong voice in the community and really empowered the community and fought a lot for the rights of the community. So we're really grateful to her for.
for being that voice and I was really stoked to see you joining them after your trip outside of the Magento community at cart.com. What was it like for you to step outside of the Magento bubble for two years maybe? And then come back into the community. How were things left?
How did you experience coming back into the community? What's changed?
Eric Erway (04:06)
I mean, you know, so much has changed and so much has not. And I see that in a good way. I think taking a perspective and you can say this about almost anything in life when you, when you kind of zoom out and take, you know, kind of look at things, you, you realize the most important parts and you know, I had a really, really positive experience at cart.com. I learned a lot, work with a lot of smart people, moved fast and got deeper into areas that I wasn't as involved in around fulfillment and logistics and, and, and getting back into the throws of the startups. It reminded me a lot of.
What I really enjoyed back in my earliest days of Magento at this point, seemingly like almost 10 years ago. And so I liked a lot about that, but I think, you know, one of the things I realized is I've missed, I really missed the Magento community, like the proper Magento community. I really were like, really enjoyed working in commerce. You know, I know things have changed. I know people who've moved on and things of that, but you know, the community is the product, right? And I keep saying that now is, you know, when you talk about like product management and all.
Yes, there's the physical product, but there's the people around it. You know, you and I have known each other for years in different contexts. We've known people who are doing some really interesting and different things and that's great as well. And I think what I realized is, you know, sometimes there's such an obsession around the platform, the technology. Well, that's incredibly important. I think that unifies people. I think the reality is it's the people around it. It's around innovation. It's around delivering to customers. It's around, quite honestly, making what makes you happy, right? Both collectively and those around you. And so.
Willem (05:21)
Mm.
Eric Erway (05:34)
I couldn't be happier and I couldn't be more thankful about the opportunity. It really has worked out and we're doing some really amazing things over at ShipperHQ. And I'm really thankful for Jo and others who've been those advocates and, you know, it really were some of the draws I had about coming back into it. So yeah, super happy. Yeah.
Willem (05:53)
Your official capacity is a product or experience designer, can I say? You started out as a UX designer, I think. And that's also what your initial role at Magento was, pre -Adobe acquisition. How did that role evolve? Like, how did you come into Magento initially?
Eric Erway (06:04)
Yep.
Willem (06:20)
What did you work on and how did you grow into becoming the driving factor behind PWA Studio, which I'm sure we have some things to talk about. We'll get there, but let's start.
Eric Erway (06:33)
What's that? Tell me more about this. Yeah, it's a great question. In many ways, it's complicated when you see my background. I tend to solve a lot of the same type of problems under different contexts. My background actually goes way back in computer science. My first couple of years were really around development around platforms that don't even exist. But I found myself at the front end time and time again. At the time, the disciplines of user experience,
aside from maybe the research were pretty nascent. And so I'd always find myself wanting to solve for some of those problems, appreciating the backend, appreciating everything that's behind all of that. But I kept wanting to solve those problems. So every situation I was in, whether it's a small company, actually spent some time in working in the government as an intern and things like that, you wanna like, regardless of title or function, like I'm always finding myself there. And so every company tends to have these different. One of the biggest ironies around product management is the profession itself is not as...
defined as it could and should be. Some product managers do their own designs. Some of them don't. Some designers get a little bit more into product and do their own research. And so it's been a really wild kind of wild ride all the way from kind of my academics and even before that into some of my earliest work and getting into Magento where, you know, the problem to solve for when I came in was, was right at the beginnings of, I would say right, right about when Magento 2 was going to be released. And so we were in the throes.
Willem (07:58)
Hmm.
Eric Erway (07:59)
having worked with and working with the teams that were doing the designs, the product team was just forming and were starting to really rev out the last aspects of the experience, like the storefront, like Luma. Fun side note on Luma, I don't know if people know, the photography for Luma was done by some of the folks within the innovations group on the coast of the Jersey shore. And so the team actually did...
A lot of, I remember a lot of the makings of it all coming together. We had a content writer who did the, you know, all the sample data and all of those things were happening right when it got there. And so the problem was really around the experience design, shoring that up. And then at the time we brought on some, some, you know, some advanced prototypers to help us kind of rough out like, what is the next thing? And, and so at that point, I started looking at some of our next products like order management, with, with some of the teams in Barcelona and, then.
Willem (08:46)
Mm -hmm.
Eric Erway (08:55)
came back into the core product itself and really refocused. And this goes away, you know, it goes into kind of the throes of COVID, like leading the 2 .4 release and working with the various teams that kind of were in support of that. And the thread through all of that was the community where there's the community on the inside of Magento proper then into Adobe. But then what really got me excited and just kind of comes back to happiness was, you know, co -developing, co -designing all of that with the community for that. And so some of my best moments.
Willem (09:21)
Mm -hmm.
Eric Erway (09:23)
professionally, but certainly with Magento Adobe or around PWA Studio, but not limited to that. I would love sitting in hackathons, meeting, talking with people as a designer is a great way to get feedback. As someone who used to be a developer, it was interesting to appreciate what was going on there. And as someone who product and product, like we thrive on shipping things, right? And so you would see, you know, small pieces towards the whole and doing so. And, and some of that even went into some new and interesting areas with Google. Like we, you know, we, we did, and I think you're there.
Willem (09:42)
Hmm.
Eric Erway (09:53)
we had a couple of these contribution days where we contributed some of the Magento rules. We did at that table with Andrew, right? So yeah. Yep, yep, yep. Yeah, so we did the rules for Lighthouse. I don't think people knew that. So we fed those into that team at the time. And so we've been fortunate to work on some really interesting work, but to your question, it really is kind of my role and my background is always kind of flexed where that's.
Willem (09:56)
Yeah, it's where we met the first time. Magento Live EU in Amsterdam, 2018.
Mm -hmm.
Eric Erway (10:21)
where that's needed and inherently there's some crossover.
Willem (10:26)
So I should think about writing out customer journeys really...
leading the UX, UI team, design team, just thinking of what those user interactions should look like. And you did that both partly for Luma and then eventually what time, what did it look like when PWA Studio was first discussed internally? What did that moment in time look like when the decision was made not to continue investment in?
Luma, if I may say that, and go to, I've heard the stories, not extensive, but apparently there was a group of people that marched to Mordor, no, they went to the Google head office and you talked about this new thing that Google was working out, which was PWA technology. How did that process go?
Eric Erway (11:12)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Mm -hmm. Yeah.
Yeah, so I, you know, full disclosure, I came in probably a month or two after a lot of that had been kind of set in motion. So I joined shortly after James Zetlin and others really started to get involved. And the origin of the project was really to solve. And I think it's a unique, it's a neat problem to solve because I see a lot of the great, I see a lot of the goodness happening with Hyvä. It started with the developer experience actually, and a developer experience and the acknowledgement of a front end that wasn't, you know,
it was starting to kind of reach its limits in terms of what it could and should do. But James is always a very big advocate of the developer experience. We actually spent quite a bit of time even at the API level with Samia and others who would just, like we would understand usability at the API level. Things that you don't really typically do. What does it mean to be friendly? And what does it mean to be user friendly as we started to build out the GraphQL endpoints in parallel. But it started off as that kind of that.
Willem (12:19)
Yeah.
Eric Erway (12:25)
from kind of from that thrust in parallel to our relationship that was building with Google, who was a big advocate for the open web and a big advocate for some of the newer technologies around the service worker and some of the libraries that supported that. And so it was kind of, it was a unique match that helped us achieve what we were trying to do, get the support and I would say some of the guidance. It was very much just a light collaboration really not beyond that. And then that would then, you know,
get into aspects like Lighthouse and others where Magento as a whole kind of rose up because we were able to include recommendations on how to make that better as we were kind of developing the next. But it started off with developer experience. And when I came in, I was like, you know, this is great, but like we've got to make sure we're continuing to extend this into the other personas who are part of this journey. Obviously the shopper experience, but also the merchant experience too. And that can be, as you know, it can be a bit of a challenge with any headless implementation.
where you had the backend maybe not as cognizant of the front end. So we had to wrestle with those quite a bit and land something that was highly performant, scalable, flexible, and added net new functionality that was starting to emerge at the same time where the standard itself was just emerging. Cause even in those days, it wasn't even fully supported by iOS and things like that. And so it was bleeding edge. It is, no, it actually, no, well, yeah, it's longer conversation.
Willem (13:22)
Hmm.
Yeah, still today.
Eric Erway (13:51)
Yes, but and EU was a little bit trickier on there. So yeah.
Willem (13:51)
Yeah. And about the time that you left Adobe, were they already working on the next iteration App Builder and Edge Delivery? I think that probably already was set in motion, right?
Eric Erway (14:12)
As far as I know, to be honest, I wasn't deeply involved in that. We were still on a storefront journey. One of the things that we did that was probably not as widely known or publicized in the Magento world is that we aired on the side of reusability and reusable components and services with other teams across Adobe. And over time, the names of those products and platforms and such kind of change. But there are quite a few examples that are out there that kind of use the parts from Venia and the aspects of Venia.
Willem (14:28)
Mm -hmm.
Eric Erway (14:41)
top of mind, I think, you know, TiVo .com was always a good example. Sazerac, which has like Buffalo Trace whiskey. They use a lot of those components and, you know, I've seen a couple of them since, you know, since leaving as well, as far as like the implementations. And there was a, I, an inherent reuse there, but I think what they've done recently is, is with, you know, Elena and others have started to kind of package this around a little bit more, not quite infrastructure, but really a focused on that deployment and developer experience a bit more in a way that is.
kind of uniquely Adobe, but I haven't been as, that was, the pieces were starting to emerge, but at that point I had not seen that emerge or even forming to what it is now, but I'm sure a lot of it's very much based on where we started.
Willem (15:13)
Yeah.
Yeah, I think by now PWA Studio has more become somewhat of a stepping stone to the next thing that they've built. And if my information or my understanding is sound, then the PWA Studio components, or I should say Peregrine components probably, those have now been more or less transformed into components that are used in Edge Delivery
or in Experience Manager. So they still live on. I think PWA Studio doesn't really get new functionalities of further development. I think they're maintaining it the same as they are doing with Luma. But yeah, you can also see that the adoption kind of bottom out. I think they're a little over...
thousand stores live now on BuiltWith which isn't perfect data, but it's one measurement at least to compare platforms. And yeah, I think just to quickly paint the landscape that we're currently looking at, Adobe has released Edge Delivery services, which is more or less...
Eric Erway (16:24)
Yeah.
Willem (16:44)
a proxy to show Experience Manager pages. And then Commerce is woven into that. And I think they're currently at a state where there's a bit of fallback mechanism, like carts and checkout is not really Edge Delivery yet that falls back to Venia or even Luma. But I'm sure the dream is that the future plan is to evolve into.
fully SaaS like application. I think the good thing for Magento as a community is that all these services today still depend on a monolith to feed data. So Magento is still the driving factor or the backbone of everything that they're doing, but they're syncing a lot into in memory services, so to say. So that...
Eric Erway (17:16)
Mm -hmm.
Willem (17:37)
The GraphQL, the middleware can serve product data very quickly while the actual data structure today still comes from Magento. And I think for the upcoming years, there's such a big dependency for Adobe to Magento as a monolithic application. So many merchants currently running on that tech stack.
that we as a community can rest assured that it will be maintained for quite a while and security updates are being added. But yeah, other than that, it's no secret that no new features will be introduced to Magento as a platform. And most of the things that they're now introducing into Adobe Commerce are introduced as microservices or...
Eric Erway (18:10)
Yep.
Mm -hmm.
Willem (18:34)
mini applets that they even backport into Luma, which is a bit cringe when they launch a Sensei live search and they use React components that they load into Luma, which is already burdened with so much JavaScript to add in React entirely for a quick search. But I've personally spoken to their product team.
Eric Erway (18:41)
Yeah.
Mm -hmm.
Yeah.
Willem (19:03)
maybe over a year ago and we discussed things like this and it was on the roadmap to improve performance there and still work on that. But yeah, the tendency I think will be that more and more things will be built independent of Magento as a monolith and eventually it will be decoupled in a way that Magento is an optional backbone and no longer...
Eric Erway (19:32)
Mm.
Willem (19:32)
a requirement. For sure, interesting development, of course, for us as an ecosystem. I think our tone of voice has kind of shifted from being upset that Adobe took this turn while we always knew that they were going to do this. There was no secret that they were going to move it upmarket. But the tone has shifted to...
Eric Erway (19:54)
Mm -hmm.
Willem (20:00)
At least realizing that the investment that Adobe today makes in the Magento platform is substantial. Just maintaining it. I mean, you're for sure you have some insights in what an investment it actually is to run GitHub as an organization, do issue grooming and just...
Eric Erway (20:06)
Hmm.
Hmm?
Mm -hmm.
Mm -hmm.
Willem (20:25)
processing PRs and releasing security updates, keep things compatible with newer versions of PHP, which is only ramping up. I think PHP got a bit in a slump a couple of years ago. And then with the introduction of PHP 7 and then 8, things are moving quite quickly. I mean, PHP is becoming a way more performance and more interesting language to work with. No longer the platform, the...
Eric Erway (20:30)
Mm -hmm.
Mm -hmm.
Mm -hmm.
Willem (20:55)
programming language that people tease you with, like for the big bullies that it's not a proper language. It's actually really enjoyable to work with. But yeah, the release tendency of PHP makes for Adobe to have to release more updates and keep it compatible. And just things like...
Eric Erway (20:59)
Right. Yeah.
Willem (21:21)
What is it? Elastic search, being replaced with OpenSearch, which then needs a new adapter and you know, things constantly move. So I think as a community, it's great that at least we have an entity like Adobe behind it to ensure reliability and have a strong brand behind it. But yeah, it's clear that...
Eric Erway (21:24)
Mm -hmm.
Willem (21:48)
On the innovation side, we need a community to drive this forward.
Yeah, then the Magento Association comes into play, which has been given the role by Adobe to kind of become the shepherd or at least to rally the community behind them to get people to become maintainer, help issue grooming, reviewing PRs and help the Adobe team to get new bug fixes into Magento.
Yeah, that's still proven to be a bit challenging. Matthias, who's now the director of the Magento Association. He's looking for the right... Is director right? But that's the right term. Yeah. He's really making an effort of trying to get that collaboration between the...
Eric Erway (22:32)
Mm.
Thanks, everyone.
Willem (22:56)
Adobe Maintaining Team and the the Magento community going so that well Adobe has reached out a hand and said well if you bring the maintainers we provide you the infrastructure we will make sure that we accept new PRs way more quickly. There's a
the prioritization model right now where we can vote on PRs on GitHub and the ones that get the most votes are being merged into Magento every month. So that's a great development. So there's actually a lot of power in the community that we've been given from Adobe. It's just they need us to help them a little bit in doing the reviewing and processing. So...
If you're listening and you think that's interesting, we should take the offer from Adobe and work with them.
It's actually a lot of people are really positive about this involvement and the fact that you can now submit the PR and in some cases they are merged within a month. That's been the number one complaint in the past. And of course, there's a lot of PR still hanging from years ago that...
It's still well, well if they're still relevant we need to bring them back to attention like update the PRS and everything But yeah, we need to come back and revisit the idea of working with Adobe here Yeah, how How do you see the role of the MA of course you were The Adobe liaison on the on the association board, which is where we spent
two hours a month. You've seen another side of me where I was desperate to get things done and change the dynamics around or the messaging on magento .com that we needed that website back. It was and still is, I think, a great vehicle.
Eric Erway (25:19)
Mm -hmm.
Willem (25:28)
the community, the MA where a lot of stuff is happening behind closed doors which is...
which sounds a bit more secretive than it should be, but that's mostly because we receive a lot of input from community members that have concerns about something or they're flagging something with us. And that's typically what we bring to a board meeting. And then that's brought to the attention of the right people in Adobe. So that liaison at Adobe, which you were before and what Ritesh is doing now, that's a...
Eric Erway (25:56)
Mm -hmm.
Willem (26:07)
That's a really important role. Just today, I noticed that that's a good example. Shopify has started to run Google AdWords campaigns for Magento Enterprise. And I saw that and I thought, wait a minute, I thought that Adobe was quite vigilant on the usage of the Magento brand in AdWords. And normally I think Google should flag that and...
Well, that's one thing that then goes into our MA boards chat and it's picked up immediately. But it's also things that are a bit more important for the community. Like, you know, the ownership of the Magento brand, the fact that we needed this magento .com website, which you and I spent many, many, many hours talking about, which got a lot of...
Eric Erway (26:55)
Mm.
Willem (27:04)
push back initially, but now finally we're going to launch magento open source .org website, which should inform merchants about what the magento platform is and serve a bit as a marketing platform. So yeah, those things it's, it's tricky because sometimes it you need the right timing to say things publicly. It's sometimes it's a bit sense also time sensitive because we want to fix something before.
Eric Erway (27:17)
Mm -hmm.
Willem (27:33)
before the community panics and says, I have another example. This is a good thing. And I'll let you talk soon again.
Eric Erway (27:38)
Mm -hmm.
you're fine. No, I'm enjoying this. This is like a trip down memory lane. I know exactly where and what and all the makings of the conversation. So yeah, this is great.
Willem (27:55)
Another example of something that we resolved within the MA is that I got flagged by a couple of people that on Github .com, on the Magento Github repositories, a new module was introduced and all of the copyright contained proprietary copyright notices.
from Adobe. So all rights reserved and it didn't have an open source copyright notice. And luckily, you know, a couple of years ago, people would first thing they would have done is post it on Twitter and cause concerns because this is the moment they're going to make it, you know, they're going to take away the open source copyright and this is the first sign and...
Eric Erway (28:42)
No. Big storm.
Willem (28:53)
So we raised this at the board, I immediately sent a message to Ritesh and he brought it to people inside of Adobe and we quickly got note back that no one was aware, nothing was going to change. Don't panic, said no, no, I'm trying to prevent people from panicking. And it was in a beta release and the release, I think it was for 2 .4.7, so the latest release.
Eric Erway (29:07)
No.
Right. Yeah.
Mm.
Willem (29:18)
It was already planned within a week, I think, and it was going to be launched with the new copyright notice. And they fixed it just in time before it was published so that no one had to pick up their pitchfork and cause outrage because there was nothing, nothing, nothing was wrong. But, you know, this is a bit the tendency that the communities had in the past. So, yeah, that's another thing.
where the MA is more or less the bridge between community and Adobe. And the reality is that the people that are currently at Adobe that work with the commerce product today, not many of them have a background with Magento. Very few of them know what this great community is about, where...
where a response typically comes from, which is always passion. We're so passionate about our platform and we're always a bit afraid that things will be taken away from us. And there's a lot of people at the Adobe side actually working really hard for us to maintain the platform and reach out a helping hand to move this platform forward and help us nurture the community.
And when all we do is cause outrage when something seems to be going wrong, all these Adobe people see from us is our bad side. And they're actually trying to make a case internally to get things done for us. And the actual effects of us being upset means that they don't really like work because they will...
They get anxious that if they interact with us, they might get a lot of negativity thrown at them. And I know for a fact that in the Magento days, multiple employees felt harassed personally because the community was just...
Eric Erway (31:26)
Right.
Willem (31:41)
lashing out because there were issues with the Magento 2 product and things were going wrong and the situation was dire and the few people that were brave enough to stand at the battle line fighting for us basically they felt terrible and they deserved a lot better so yeah that's unfortunately I had
I think I've played a role in that to some extent as well. I know I've talked to at least one ex -Adobe person who told me personally that some things were... You know, I went through a major burnout. I was upset. I lost my agency, I lost my mental health, my health, all my savings. I was not necessarily angry, but I just didn't understand how this could happen. And I was...
Eric Erway (32:25)
Hmm.
Mm -hmm.
Willem (32:39)
I was just upfront about how...
how tricky that situation was for me. And people fighting hard to resolve that situation and it has been resolved. I mean, Adobe really invested in those years after the 2 .1 release, 2 .2, 2 .3 were really solid releases and a lot of people worked really hard to make that happen. And today we have a platform that's working like, I don't want to, I just want to work with this. It's all that I need today. And the truth is...
Eric Erway (32:57)
Hmm.
Mm -hmm.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Willem (33:14)
that Adobe gave that to us. They took something that was kind of shitty, 2 .0 wasn't great. And there were many issues and they turned it around and they invested a lot to get it where it is today. And yeah, I just want to honor it. I want to make sure that we help this community and all the merchants and all the agencies.
all the developers, all the platforms, you know, including Shipper HQ, including all the payment providers and the extension developers. We have to be there for them to give continuation of this platform. Many, many, many people depend on this software for their daily work and lives. They're feeding their families. So that's why I'm here.
Eric Erway (34:07)
Mm -hmm. It's really true. It is. This is almost a great pre -talk to my keynote, right? And so like these are the stories of Magento, right? And the stories are personal, they're deep. I've never worked for a company where I've seen people get tattoos of that company. There's quite a few. That's like, wow, that's something. That's something. There's so much more than just a platform and there's so much more than what's there. And...
And that's okay, right? And so I think, you know, the way, like the stories you've described, you know, I've been in, I've been in empathize and I've been on both sides of that. And I have a lot of, I think I lead with a lot of empathy for both sides, right? And I think you can see it right now. I agree. I think Adobe has done some great work to really work on the most important parts about the quality, reliability, the stability, the security, all those things that are incredibly important, especially for a company that is as big as.
Willem (34:38)
Mm -hmm.
Eric Erway (35:05)
big as they are and there's the responsibilities and the stakes are higher. Security is getting harder. Infrastructure is getting hard, all these things, but you know, sometimes it means, you know, not necessarily having that, you know, the shiny new thing at every aspect and every corner there. And for me, it's a big opportunity. I think that's so great. There's the line and you know, you look at kind of both of our worlds, you look at the community. Now we know where that is. Now we can innovate. That's exciting.
Willem (35:06)
Hmm.
Eric Erway (35:33)
and enjoy that part.
Willem (35:33)
Yeah.
You mentioned your keynote, for context; Meet Magento UK will be held in 18 days. You're gonna be keynote speaker. Tell me a little bit, what are you excited about for Meet Magento UK and why do people need to come to the event and what will you bring in your keynote? And you don't need to give away the whole thing.
Eric Erway (35:49)
Mm -hmm.
Yeah.
Willem (36:04)
But what are you going to bring us?
Eric Erway (36:07)
Yeah, I think this time it's going to be personal. I'm walking in the footsteps of people who've done this before, people who are far closer to the Magento ecosystem, far closer to maybe the region, or far closer to what have you. But I think for me, it represents a return. It represents a perspective that I think is going to be holistic and I think really connect with each and every person in the audience, whether you're a merchant, whether you're a partner or developer.
and really cover a lot of what we're talking about. And no, we're at an interesting time in the community. And so I think our stories, both the past, but also our future are the product, right? And so it kind of comes back to the conversation we talk about with, you know, what does it mean to be a product manager and that shift from here to there? And like, this is what we're building and things change and foundations change and that's okay. And I'm really excited about the stories that we'll create together, but how we got here is important too. Let's not forget about that. I've...
You know, talked to Philip on several occasions where he's like, you know, we should document all these, all these stories somewhere. And, you know, while that may not be, you know, you know, they may be, you know, as, as endearing to one person that's endearing to this community, you know, the stories that you talk about, there's a whole chapter on, on what, what it, what it took to open source PageBuilder, that there's not enough time, to talk about. There's a whole story about last minutes, last ditch efforts to hold, you know, a major Magento release because.
Willem (37:07)
Mm -hmm.
Yeah.
Eric Erway (37:35)
you know, because somebody took a stand against CSS variable names that were racist in nature that were caught well beyond that. And you can see that. And there's interesting, and they all did that because it was right at the time. They all did it because they cared about it. And that's what fuels this. And so I've always, from my perspective, appreciated your continued story, the highs, the lows, and the...
and everything you've been doing as essentially the guardian of the Magento Galaxy. And I'm just hoping to help more. And so my talk is really to help, I think, inspire, not dwell on the past, recognize the past, though, recognize the changes here, and I think point out the areas where you cannot. There's a lot more here that I think people realize has always been there before. We just don't have to wait for someone to set that in motion. We don't have to wait for someone to set up.
a contribution day or a MageRun or this or that. It's all kind of there. Just needs a champion here or there, and maybe it's new people here and there. That's okay for that one. So that's going to be the premise of my talk, but I think it's going to appeal to everybody. People who've been with the community for a long time, people who are new to it, and people who have some of the big questions, which I think are super fair. Change is tough, but I could be more excited about the future. I think Magento's role and the way he described it plays a very, very big part in that.
Willem (38:28)
Yeah.
Eric Erway (38:57)
and gives us a lot of room to innovate at those edges, no matter who you are, whether you're a partner, whether you're a developer. It's just a matter of taking advantage of it because the, but it's right there.
Willem (39:08)
So when you look at Magento as a platform and the ecosystem, what are your, and maybe take Mage-OS into account, which we haven't talked about yet, what is your outlook? Like if you had to make a guess and maybe weave in a bit of advice or like how you think, what should we do as a community? Where are things heading?
Eric Erway (39:17)
Mm -hmm. Yeah.
I think we should work tightly aligned but loosely coupled. And what I mean by that is we should align on the things that are most important for this community, the people, the goals, the mission, not debate over the things that like, we're waiting for such and such, this company, this entity, this whoever, this person of the past or what have you. I think you have to align on what's important and really that hasn't changed for years and years and years and years.
But, but stay loosely coupled. We've got a couple, we've got emergent communities that are existent in the Magento, ecosystem. I love what's happening in Mage-OS. I'd love to see more of that connect into the greater good. I was really encouraged with Matthias and shared it. Meet Magento, Florida in the roadmap. That's great. I think with what Parul is doing on the, with, with the, with the communities'... shout-out Parul, she's awesome. She, she's, she does a lot of things behind the scenes between her and Nicole that I don't think people.
Willem (40:19)
Shout out, Parul.
Yeah.
Eric Erway (40:28)
people see and so they're doing some great things as well.
Willem (40:31)
I sometimes wish that it was more visible and you know it's not for every person to be a public person but Parul is working so hard, she's so kind and she's amazing to talk with and she has her heart in the right place for Magento. I just wish at times that the communication channels were just a bit...
Eric Erway (40:34)
Yeah.
Cheers.
Willem (40:58)
better, not just for her, but we kind of lost the public faces in Adobe, which maybe is caused by what I mentioned before, we haven't treated them well enough. So stepping up and being there as a public figure puts you puts a target on your back, which is which is just really sad because we always we flourished under the time where we had people that we could
Eric Erway (41:00)
Mm -hmm.
Willem (41:27)
communicate to and people that had enough reach because the effect is that everything that Parul does gets far too little attention and visibility. And the best thing that I can do is retweet it or reshare it with a comment, but it would ideally get a better platform where, and...
I know a lot of things are shared in the Magento forums and that's just not the favorite place on the internet of most people. It's just not a great communication channel. But nevertheless, I've met her on a couple of events last time in Magento India and I really appreciate her. She's great. And I hope she keeps doing the good work for us. Yeah, it's a...
Eric Erway (42:23)
for sure, shout out to her.
Willem (42:25)
Yeah, you said you would like to see MageOS more integrated into the greater good. And I think that's something that's already established, I guess. Way more collaboration is already taking place between the MA and MageOS in content creation. And there's a bit of...
tasks that are being devised or shared, split between the two. And yeah, there's just a lot more official work that comes with anything that the MA does. And I think for the MA, it's really important that they make sure that the official Magento repositories that they remain maintained.
Eric Erway (43:10)
Yeah.
Willem (43:24)
and that they get enough attention just for, you know, being the backbone, be the leading. You know, we worked on Magento LTS STS, you and me together. It was a big plan that we worked out at the MA board. We spent months discussing it and eventually it took another turn, which was sad. But now what eventually came from that is that Mage-OS more or less.
Eric Erway (43:36)
Mm -hmm. Yep.
Willem (43:54)
became the promise of having STS version. And Magento itself is that long -term support version. And what we're trying to accomplish with Mage-OS is that we can really bring innovation to the platform without restrictions, but also not messing with the LTS version. The STS is just the STS, it's a distribution. And we can...
If we want, we can set up an extra distribution where we just, we can call it a experimentation lab and we just mess around with things and we, we refactor things, we build new indexers system, we build a new feature on top of it. And if something works out well, we can decide to move that into Mage-OS and even push it upstream to Magento open source and see. We need to, at some point we need to test what Adobe is open to.
receiving from the community. And if we build a feature, one thing that's been worked on at Mage-OS which Matthias also brought up as an idea in the MA, so it's a bit of double work that's been done there, but the actual building of a new admin panel or redesign of the Magento admin has taken place in Mage-OS. A couple of folks took it upon them to just...
Eric Erway (44:51)
Mm -hmm. Yep.
Mm -hmm.
Willem (45:19)
write new style sheets basically and
Eric Erway (45:22)
saw that's beautiful. I saw Artem has done a nice job of that.
Willem (45:26)
It makes such a difference because if you're an agency and you're selling an e-commerce platform to a merchant and often they don't really care about the platform. They care about the solution and they care about what they see. And if as an agency you can show them a couple of projects that you've done and those shops look nice and they do their performant and they do what they need to do and then you see the admin panel and it looks horrifically outdated.
It's just not as easy to sell if a platform like Shopify or even Shopware has just updated UI in the admin. And it's not even really UX, it's more, it really boils down to design whether something looks outdated or not. You don't even need to update the tech stack in the admin, not for the merchants, for developers.
Eric Erway (46:07)
Mm. Yep.
Willem (46:24)
Sure, they would like to get rid of Knockout and RequireJS and everything, but just to make it easier to sell it to a merchant, it just needs to look nicer. And that's something that we've worked on. And one of the ideas that we had at the MA board was, well, let's see if we can work on that as a community and not bother Adobe with asking permission or like getting them involved too much. And then let's see what happens if we offer it to them.
Eric Erway (46:26)
Hmm?
Willem (46:52)
And if they want, they can take it and it's free. And they can push it upstream to work with Adobe Commerce as well. So even their paying customers get a nice... I mean, Adobe Commerce already has an updated theme, which looks better than the Luma or the standard Magento version. But still, it's a bit outdated. But I know it's enterprise so far. I know what Salesforce looks like.
Eric Erway (47:21)
Yeah.
Willem (47:22)
We're all paying good money for software like that and it looks horrific, but yeah, sometimes it just needs to do the job.
Eric Erway (47:31)
I've really been inspired by the innovation. I'm hoping for the best for that. And I think, you know, if you're out look wise, I think the more that we build together, I think the better. And so the make, you know, and there's different pockets that are doing great work, who've been doing great work, the major was doing great work, the partners are doing great work. And we're all filling in gaps in areas that ultimately were the customers and the merchants went right. And so I think, I think that's the fun part. When we start building together, everything starts to kind of click and
The same thing I would say about the community as we did in the earliest days of PWA, let's make this so big people can't ignore it. You can start very, very small, but if you make it so big, you get your first customer, first contributors, you start to solve problems. They're like, I can't ignore this. They may not even be talking to you or whatever, but they're noticing. But if you make it so big, it's impossible to ignore. And so I wish that for the community. And I think that it's a different orientation around the innovation engine itself.
you know, backed by some of the principles and the ways of kind of getting change done and the PRs and such. But like, I'm excited about it. It's actually, there's, there's a lot we can do with this. And I think it's part of the talk. I think there's, we shouldn't feel as, as held back. I think it's sometimes we, there'll be some occasional folks who feel that way. And I get it. It's not, it's, it's a different orientation. There's a lot you can do though. There really is. We're just scratching the surface.
Willem (48:51)
Yeah, we need to work as a community. And what we really needed was to bring back the positive vibe, which was really at the core of what I've tried to do with Hyvä. Like this is zero tolerance for negativity on our Slack. I immediately act when I see someone is talking negatively about someone else's work, whether that's...
negative feedback about what someone else built or whether they are talking bad about a particular extension developer. It's always, we try to really keep the human aspect inside. So I always immediately DM people and I say, okay, I understand you might be frustrated because you're working with an extension that doesn't do what you would like it to do. Not everyone who's building software is a senior developer.
And if you try to remember the time that you were a junior developer, you might realize that the person that built that extension that didn't get the proper guidance for whatever reason, or they are still learning or they didn't get the time or the resources to do it well, you just took away the opportunity to do better because you didn't provide them feedback. And you just made them feel really, really, really bad about themselves. And...
That's just not how we build a community where everyone joins forces and we have a happy vibe. And the only way that we can work as a community is to be positive and help each other. And if someone, even someone who built an extension that didn't work as expected or didn't follow best code practices, if even that person can still feel good about themselves because they got some help and some feedback that they could implement to build a better product.
Or escalate it to a colleague and say, well, we got this feedback and how do we resolve this? And maybe it needs to be escalated. But if we start putting down particular extension companies or particular developers, there's nothing to be wonder. You get rid of your frustration maybe because you were stuck with a particular extension and you couldn't make it work. But...
It's not how you build a community. So we need more of that. Yeah.
Eric Erway (51:21)
It's not. Positive vibes only. Positive vibes only. Maybe we should change my talk to that. That's it. The story is just positive vibes. That's it.
Willem (51:30)
Yeah, I've given so yeah, and that's all its own perception and it's not it's not just that it's also the way that we are talking about Magento as a as a community or as a as an ecosystem like the wider e-commerce ecosystem.
Eric Erway (51:36)
Mm, sorry.
Mm -hmm.
Willem (51:57)
There's too much talk of Magento is still alive, you know, or Magento is still, Magento is not dead yet, you know, and it's the opposite of what you want to achieve because what you, I mean, and it's good, people are, people are not aware of what they're implying.
But what you're implying is that you're countering that someone else has said or claimed that Magento is dying or is going to die. And that's included when you say Magento is still alive, you're countering. We are here. We have an amazing ecosystem. We have a market share still in e-commerce that is enormous and has so much potential and has so much that we can do.
We need to talk about what's next, how we can grow and just outline the positive things. And yeah, I've talked about this with Matthias because we go to events together and then we spend hours at the airport and we talk about how we should approach things at the next event. And so he already, I've already discussed with him and of course he fully agrees. So it's really in the way that we...
send out that message that makes a lot of difference. Yeah.
Eric Erway (53:26)
Agreed. Yeah. I mean, a lot of the things we see in commerce and I would look beyond even the Magento platform was influenced by the Magento platform. Right. And that's like the it's, it's, it's hard not to recognize that you think about people who move on and think about the innovations, the perspectives, and sometimes people like myself coming back into that and go, now we have new perspectives to bring into this, to help fuel the innovation, to help do everything described. And so, yeah, I love the message there, right? Cause in the end, we're just, we're just people, we're just humans. We're trying, you know, it's, you know, yes.
You know, there's, you know, there's all the principles about delivering quality software. Nobody's saying let's not, but it's, it's how you get there. It's the people who show up. It's the people who care. It's the people helping each other to achieve that goal. Right. And so that's the, you know, like the spirit of being like tightly aligned and loosely coupled. Let's all get there. We all need, don't need, need to die. Things have changed. That's fine. But yeah, I love your, I love your perspective on the, is Vincente still alive? Sure. It's, it's alive. Fine. Right. I acknowledge it. It's alive. Let's, but you, that conversation already starts.
Like you're on the back foot already when you're having that conversation, just like, and that's, that's just not where it is.
Willem (54:31)
No, no. And in the end, for for so many agencies, and merchants, Magento is working so well. And they have they're not even aware of the bigger picture or whatever, whatever is happening on a global scale. They just have a piece of software that's working well. And agencies that are
just showing an e-commerce solution that they implemented. They built our entire stack around, which is a sound solution, which is beats customizability or even performance or ROI on other platforms. It just depends on the use case. And sure, it's become more difficult to put a small merchant that's just starting out. You should always test your market. And...
There's cheap ways to implement Magento 2, but for sure Magento 1 was more accessible to the smallest merchants. And we've gotten into an era where it makes sense if you decide to knit some socks and you want to sell them online, you shouldn't be on Magento. But as soon as you go up from there, Magento...
Eric Erway (55:50)
Yeah.
Willem (55:56)
very quickly becomes an option depending on your use case and your requirements. And in the end for the merchants, they need a working solution and they need a partner that helps them to be enabled to sell their products online. And the whole, it doesn't matter. It's so funny, it was recently...
Eric Erway (56:13)
Hmm?
Willem (56:21)
There was a post about Shopify being the market leader and eating up the entire market and how important that was. And I just failed to see how it is relevant who the biggest platform is. Because that's, if anything, it's a bad thing. Because you kill competition, you kill innovation, and you reduce the amount of choices that a merchant and an agency has to build.
Eric Erway (56:33)
Yep. Yep.
Willem (56:50)
an e-commerce store, it's as simple as that. And there's always a use case to build on the one platform versus the other. And if we stop being agnostic as an ecosystem or as the entire e-commerce global market, we all lose. And I think no one is helped by magento going away.
Eric Erway (56:52)
Mm -hmm.
Willem (57:20)
Because the options, there's no platform that has as many extensions, as many integrations, solution providers. The developer ecosystem is still the biggest. So we have everything we need to make this successful towards the future. I mean, it's there. The only thing we need is continuation and a positive vibe. So...
Eric Erway (57:46)
Hmm? Yep.
Willem (57:50)
That's where our heads need to be.
Eric Erway (57:53)
I totally agree. I could not agree more. Yeah, I'm here for it. I'm back for it. Yeah, I just see endless potential. I mean, yes, we need to focus. Yes, we need to build more and all these things, but the makings are right in front of us. So yeah, it's a good time to be in technology. And I feel the same way too, by the way, in terms of single versus multi -platform. There's always gonna be a leader. There's always gonna be change, but...
Willem (57:58)
Yeah.
Eric Erway (58:19)
I'll tell you what, you see these kinds of trends happening even with cloud, right? And you're seeing this now with AI. When you have multiple choices out there, that's competition and that makes everybody better. And you learn from that and there's different, it's, yeah.
Willem (58:33)
Monopolies are never beneficial. And you see with a monopoly that Shopify is creating that they are locking in or locking out payment providers, for example. They pick one and you can still choose another payment provider, but you will pay way more fees. So they're killing an industry.
Eric Erway (58:56)
Yep. Yep.
Willem (59:01)
And they're handing everything to Stripe as long as they want to work with Stripe, Stripe gets all the transactions until they decide to switch to another PSP. And that's just, that's so much power in the hands of one platform. And in the nature of open source, you get choice. You get to decide with Magento or Adobe commerce, you get to decide what...
payment provider you want to work with and there's a market, the market is at work to decide what rates you're paying. So you get competitive rates and Shopify is preventing that from happening. So yeah, it's not all good.
Eric Erway (59:36)
Mm -hmm. Yep.
It's not, and you know, I'm not thinking, you know, they are doing good work. They're doing some interesting things. I like what they're doing in a few areas, but there's so many other choices. There's so many choices out there and the benefits of, you know, what we've done and what we're doing in Magento, like allows you to basically choose your investment into, doing exactly what you want to do, and then take back the innovation and do that and do more of that yourself. And I think that's always been the spirit, right? If you think about the principles, what we're trying to drive for, being able to own your destiny and innovate at your own pace in the own ways.
That's where I want to be, but it's, you know, it's, yeah, it's an interesting time for sure.
Willem (1:00:28)
So one last thing I wanted to ask you about. So you joined ShipperHQ. What are they about? So what is your role at ShipperHQ and what's the business you're in? And why should people consider using ShipperHQ?
Eric Erway (1:00:31)
Mm -hmm.
Yeah.
there you go. Jo sent you this question, didn't she? (disclaimer, no she didn't) So I lead product at Shipper HQ. So I joined back in December. And so I lead product management, product design, and then product research. And so Shipper HQ, their goal is and has been to be the leading shipping experience platform on the planet. And so we are a multi -platform, but in many ways,
We fill in a lot of the gaps that the platforms don't necessarily do out of the box. And ultimately the work that we're doing around shipping is not unlike taxes where, you know, we're ultimately, we know that if you make small improvements by, let's say giving choice on carriers, choice and, you know, ultimate control on rules and offering pre -shipping and other ways in an effective way, that will lead to higher sales. That leads to AOV and such. And I think it continues to be.
That's still a very underappreciated part of the larger ORI because I know that and we know that merchants and customers are always paying a big shipping bill and then they want to understand why they want to optimize that and make the most of it. But that's just the first step. Some of the things we're doing on the product roadmap have a lot to do with going, you know, taking shipping from a cost center and making it a profit center. And the work that we're doing, I think is
Really starting to, I would say flip the script on that and really get into some interesting work around analytics and things like that. They're going to be coming out soon. So yeah, I, there's enormous potential and this is on the, you know, on the, on, you know, on, on the foundation that, you know, that Jo and many have built for, for well over 10 years and something that's already worked extremely well. And, you know, started off in the Magento ecosystem as a series of extensions for webShopApps and has created itself into a platform that is.
much larger than any of that. It's a shipping experience platform. And so yeah, I jumped on the opportunity as soon as I could. And today I'm responsible for the product, the experience and the research as well. So.
Willem (1:02:49)
I worked with it in the past. I had one particular, when I still had an agency, I had one particular customer who shipped watch straps, but also cases, you know, Rolex cases where you can display like three or five, or they had this leather rolls where you could put the watches in and like carry them, you know, because people that have many Rolexes need to travel with them.
Eric Erway (1:03:12)
Hmm?
Of course, of course.
Willem (1:03:17)
Their shipping was a huge bottleneck. They previously just had three types of boxes and it charged one amount on the store and it just took an average like okay so in some cases it cost us ten dollars to ship something.
In some cases it's 20, so let's take 15 as an average. So all customers pretty much, they had it separate, I think a little bit into customer groups, but there was no real, there was no mathematics, no algorithm in deciding what the pricing should be. And we implemented ShipperHQ there.
and which acts as a, so your product is a SaaS and it connects the store to shipping providers, but there's a brain in your SaaS that takes in information from carriers and then applies a set of rules or matrixes or...
conditions to that data and then decides what rates should be sent to the e-commerce platform and that was really powerful because it literally was it's like a rule engine and we could so one thing was the dimensional shipping so we could say a strap goes into envelope but Five straps don't fit an envelope. So you need the smallest FedEx box.
Eric Erway (1:04:45)
Hmm?
Yep. Yep.
Willem (1:04:57)
If there's one watch box included, then you can fit four straps with a box into the number two package from FedEx. So really that precisely we could define at what point they needed to pick a bigger box with FedEx and actually always charge the exact amount that the package would cost to send with FedEx. And that really empowered them because they could
Eric Erway (1:05:16)
Mm -hmm.
Willem (1:05:27)
They're based here in the Netherlands and they could ship packages with Pharex priority. They could ship a watch strap and have it delivered in 24 hours in New York. While the biggest competitor was in the US and it took them three to four business days to ship or to have it delivered. So they were beating the competition across the ocean on shipping rates because they could...
they could so precisely decide what the rates were so they had competitive rates and super quick shipping so it really helped them reduce cost and
make it way more attractive for customers to pay that shipping rate. And it was fair because otherwise, you know, ordering a strap and having to pay $15 while it in fact only costed five, I don't know. That just doesn't feel fair and it makes you shop around and go for the competition even though that takes four days longer to arrive. So they had a win -win solution powered by ShipperHQ
Eric Erway (1:06:32)
Mm -hmm.
Willem (1:06:38)
So, yeah, I was really amazed because we could really, on the level of country and even to zip code, we could define what rule and what order should be applied. We had some issues in Magento where FedEx would feed us prices including and excluding VAT depending on the country. And we needed them to always be excluding VAT in Magento.
So we wrote a set of rules in Shipper HQ in the platform to reduce the VAT before it was sent to Magento so that we always receive prices ex -VAT. So yeah, all in all, a lot of things that really empowered this merchant that wasn't clear for me from the outside, because it's not, when you say we're a shipping experience tool or...
It's very extensive.
Eric Erway (1:07:40)
It really is.
Willem (1:07:40)
Especially I think in the US market where you have so many the cross border rules are quite, you know in the Netherlands if you ship something to the Netherlands it's always the same. It doesn't matter if they deliver it at the end of the street or the other side of the country. All the rates are the same and you always have it delivered within a day. And it's different in the US, I know.
Eric Erway (1:08:04)
Well, that's, I mean, we handle the complex. Yeah, it's funny. I, you know, even having known ShipperHQ as long as I have coming into it, like, I still believe like a good portion of our value is probably underappreciated. There's so much that we do, you know, around the no code, so much we do around the complexities, right in between the platforms and the carriers that like we've got this expertise. And so I've, yeah, I've been impressed. I know exactly kind of going into it, but.
Even more so, there, I would say just sky's the limit on something that really has a strong fit, solves very specific problems, and it's a good foundation to innovate as well. And so that's what we're trying to do. So.
Willem (1:08:41)
Yeah, yeah, you take over a bit of the check checkout experience with also drop in applet where you dynamically show rates or delivery dates and locations and everything. So yeah, that's that's empowering. You're you're you're bullish on AI, I think. I see a lot of tweets from Jo on stepping in on that market. What what way are you leveraging that?
Eric Erway (1:08:52)
Mm -hmm. Yep.
Yeah, I mean, we're, we're bullish, but I think practical on AI. you know, I think there's a lot of, I think a lot of obvious things that we can do certainly around shipping that is that other people are doing, around just presenting what's out there and forecasting and really thinking about the data behind what would make a quote unquote great experience and great experiences can be different from a merchant that it will be for an end shopper or what have you, but getting a handle on that and really allowing AI to kind of.
connect the dots where it's not there. I think that's kind of the first step. Let's get all the data on the table. Let's start to see what's there. Start to forecast that. But as you can imagine, if you're as tied to shipping as we are, being able to accurately and maybe even start to recommend some of the changes you described, I'd say it would be a logical next step if I'm not getting too ahead of myself. But yeah, we're solution first, though, on it. There's a lot of AIs everywhere, et cetera. That's great. It's there. It's a capability.
we're attaching it to real problem solved that we're seeing from our customers. And we know exactly what those are really in the next couple of releases. So pretty exciting times and there's a lot coming. So.
Willem (1:10:18)
Very cool. I think this is a perfect place to wrap up. We're over an hour, so we're asking some patience from our listeners. But I mean, it was the first episode in a long time, so I think we're allowed. I'm really looking forward. Yeah, we actually did it. Now we just need to continue it.
Eric Erway (1:10:38)
We did it. Yeah.
Willem (1:10:46)
I will see you in 18 days, which I'm really looking forward to.
Eric Erway (1:10:49)
Yes. It's been a long time. It's great seeing you here too. That too has been a long time, so I can't wait.
Willem (1:10:56)
Yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing your keynotes and catching up and I'll try to get you on occasionally on MageTalk and see what's new and I hope we can continue to get your engagement with the community and I know you're trying to get more involved with the Magento Association as well. We have some...
Board seats open and new elections coming up. So who knows? You'd be interested in giving it another go. We can definitely use your perspective at the board.
Eric Erway (1:11:36)
I am. I've been pretty vocal about it. This is a new me. I'm a little bit more pushy, a little bit more specific. I would love to be part of the MA again. There's a lot that I know that I could do to help. I believe in the cause, the mission. Yeah, so I've already been, it's not a secret for sure. I definitely want to get more involved in everything we can around the community. That's what we need right now. So.
Willem (1:12:01)
Awesome. Yeah, I hope I'll get to work with you again at the MA Board. Thanks for your time. I really enjoyed it. And thank you all for listening. And we'll see you at the next episode of MageTalk. Thank you.