Stripecon 2024 highlights

This year’s Stripecon conference was held in the beautiful Ljubljana Castle in Slovenia which, judging by the photos, would have been well worth the trip on its own. A massive thank you to S2-Hub for organising the event, to Innovatif for hosting, and of course to the sponsors who made it all possible.

Talks ranged from incredible customisations in Silverstripe CMS to debugging, integrating with the open source TypeSense search engine, accessibility, and even non-technical talks such as Denis Čahuk’s talk “Creating Value: Strategies for High-Earning, Happy Engineering Teams”.

To kick off the event, Jackson Darlow, the Senior Technical Director at Silverstripe gave a talk called "Silverstripe: What's cooking" where he spoke about the current state of play at Silverstripe, what’s coming up early next year in Silverstripe CMS 6, and a sneak peek into some of the future work which is still in various stages of planning and ideation.

Some of my personal highlights this year include (in no particular order):

• xdebug by Werner Krauss and Lukas Erni: They gave an excellent look at how to debug a Silverstripe CMS project, looking at tools such as lekoala/silverstripe-debugbar, pstaender/ssshell, and of course Xdebug itself.
• Silverstripe, the good, the bad and the ugly parts or Silverstripe, the good, the bad and the awesome parts by Stephan Bauer: This talk gives a great outlook on things that Silverstripe CMS does really well, and points out areas for improvement.
• Digital Accessibility For All: Why is legislation NOT the main reason for accessible digital products and services? by Maša Malovrh: They discussed exactly why accessibility is important (spoiler alert: it’s not about the legal mandates) and gave some case studies on the benefits.
• Integrating TypeSense by Elliot Sawyer: Open-source software integrating with other open-source software. What’s not to love?

If you missed the event, don’t worry. The talks are available to watch on YouTube and slides for many of the talks are available on the Stripecon website. Go check them out!