It’s been a while since you’ve heard from us but here we are, getting back to blog posting. It turns out that producing quality content when you run your own company isn’t as easy as we thought at the beginning. ;) Anyway, let us start with the summary of the last 6 months of our activity since our first article.

Customers at the forefront

Every new self-funded business needs to do two things - gain financial stability and credibility. Both can be achieved simply by… servicing customers. And that is what we did. We worked hard to fulfill the ongoing demands of clients we had signed in Q1. What is more, we’ve managed to secure 3 new contracts.

Overall, as of today, we have 6 open collaborations with various companies:

• Fusonic - Austrian agency responsible for the re-platforming of the Swiss leader of motorcycle gear sales - mofakult.ch - from Magento 1 to Sylius. The website went live in August and we are proud to greatly contribute to this success! Actually, this is the first-ever go-live we’ve participated in since our company’s setup.
• Raiffeisen NetWorld - this name pops up frequently in all Sylius-related conversations as one of the key references proving this technology is ready for big business. We are happy to be in a close relationship with this innovative company, currently developing another strategic app within its Symfony-based digital toolset offering for German farmers.
• WTG Innovation - even though we are officially signed with the Polish department of this big German IT&ICT group (WTG), we’re working together with them on the B2B e-commerce system for the DACH division of a globally recognizable agricultural and offroad vehicle manufacturers and their distributors - powered by Sylius and Symfony, obviously!
• move:elevator - connected thanks to our presence on German Symfony meetups, we are now supporting their dev team in the migration of one of the biggest German theme parks’ ticketing websites from Oxid to Sylius. It’s worth investing in the community!
• Unleashed Technologies - with this relationship, one can say our threads have woven together two continents. Our first US-based partner turns out to be the Drupal expert with a growing Symfony experience. This is where we come in place! What is more, Unleashed is also aiming to grow its experience in the B2B e-commerce market, where Sylius fully shines as the perfect technology for complex scenarios.
• SYZYGY Warsaw - this last one is really special for us. We’ve known each other for years as two of the few organizations practicing teal management in Poland. We learned it at Sylius and continue at Commerce Weavers. From the last year, we’ve also gotten closer in technology, contributing to their software craftsmanship meetups series - Dobry Craft. Finally, we signed a formal agreement under which I act as a business developer for them, also searching for mutual opportunities. Read more in this announcement.

You will find out more about each of these partnerships in separate posts.

Events? Here we go!

Organizing and visiting community events - sharing knowledge and fun with other people - has always been our passion. In Q2 & Q3 only we were present on 14 events! Here is the list:

• 13.04 - PHPers Opole #5
• 18.04 - 4Developers
• 20.04 - Dobry Craft #6
• 27.04 - PHUGMRN 02/23
• 17.05 - Worldwide Software Architecture Summit '23
• 18.05 - Dobry Craft #7
• 26.05 - PHPers Summit 2023 - with Łukasz responsible for the agenda!
• 14.06 - PHPers Łódź #13
• 15.06 - Symfony World Online 2023
• 19.06 - Sylius Meetup Berlin
• 22.06 - Sylius Meetup Toulouse
• 22.06 - Dobry Craft #8
• 06.09 - PHPers Łódź #14
• 08-09.09 - Sylius Days Paris
• 21-23.09 - API Platform Conference in Lille

We could write a separate story about each position on the list but let me focus solely on the latter.

API Platform Conference 2023

Les Tillleuls, the creators of API Platform and organizers of this conference are definitely among our favourite people in the Symfony community. The relationship started a few years ago when as Sylius maintainers, we made a decision to implement API Platform as a default API standard for the Sylius core.

After years of multiple conversations, hackathons, and presentations we have finally made it to this year’s edition which was really special to us. It’s been the first time in Commerce Weavers history to have a conference booth. We knew that we must leave a mark.

In general, the Les Tilleuls team has always been very supportive to us and we wanted to pay back. ;) So Łukasz has come up with the idea of a presentation “Need for Speed: removing speed bumps in API projects” which should be connected to the… RC racing track at our stand.

It wasn’t easy to realize this vision and find a proper set that you can travel with on international conferences but it seems that we’ve done something really cool!

Nearly 70 people took part in the RC racing competition and we were happy to serve as a pit stop for all attendees seeking entertainment. ;)

Expect to see this stand at other conferences to come - especially SyliusCon on November 3 in Poznań, Poland.

What’s next?

The last half a year made us realize what we really want to do as Commerce Weavers. I mean, from the beginning, we knew that we would become a product company at some point in the future.

Some of you know that at first, we came up with the concept of B2BRICK - an advanced, modular B2B e-commerce platform based on Sylius (reach out if this sounds interesting!). We might come back to this idea in the future but after many discussions, pitches, and market research, we’ve decided to focus on something else.

What is it? I won’t tell you now but it is safe to communicate for the first time that we’re about to start developing it!

Stay tuned!