February is the shortest month in a year, will this be a brief update then? Lets find out.
Running and training
I’ve started the month with a plan to slightly improve my January stats. While I had good progress in the first two weeks, the second half was less active, and in the end, I didn’t achieve better total distance.
It wasn’t that bad though. I’ve finished with 58km and 9 hours of training. That was 10 runs and three visits to the gym.
February 5x5k Challenge
I’ve managed to complete one interesting challenge from Strava - the February 5x5k Challenge. I decided to run in the morning. Doing it was somewhat difficult - early mornings were cold, dark and I battled to get up and go out.
In the end, I’m happy that I’ve done it. I was never an early riser, so getting up at around 6 AM every day was hard. But it taught me, that this is something that is possible with just little effort. You know: “Sometimes the hardest part is just to close the door behind you.”
Parkrun @ Richmond Park
The first weekend of February, on Saturday, I’ve participated in 5km Parkrun race at Richmond Park. It was my first Parkrun in that location, so I was a little curious how the route looks.
It turns out, the first half was easy with a lot of downhill, and the struggle is on the 2nd part. I’ve managed to finish with a good time, around 25:19.
Running at Richmond Park
Beside mentioned Parkrun, I’ve also done a second run there, three weeks later.
It was quite cold and windy because of the winter weather coming to the UK. But I was also able to catch last moments of the sunshine in the late afternoon, so the views were great.
Bonus, I’ve spotted a group of deer, freely roaming quite close to the path where I was running. Great experience!
Winter in London
Speaking of winter… We had quite unusual weather in London last week, with snow, cold wind and freezing temperature. I must say, it wasn’t enjoyable so I’m glad its now over ;-)
Magento Partner Kickoff meeting - ACHIEVE 2018
I’ve joined Magento Partner Kickoff meeting as creativestyle is a solution partner of Magento.
Some key takeaways from the presentations through the day:
- Magento is growing heavily, year over year,
- They have strong open source community and ecosystem,
- In 2018 they plan to focus on marketing in UK, Germany & France markets building local presence (office, localized content)
- They see tremendous opportunity in growth in the B2B market
- Major competitors are SAP Hybris, Salesforce, Shopify Plus, IBM, Oracle, Shopware & Episerver
- They think they have a substantial advantage with the modern codebase and large community
- Magento is highlighted as a market leader in Gartner, and Forrester reports
- They extend their core offer with new products like Business Intelligence tools, Magento Order Management, and Multi-Source inventory
- They actively pursue sales of their Cloud solution
If you’re interested in more details about this topic, feel free to reach out to me, and I can share some more information.
Summing up with few words - it was an interesting event. I’ve learned lots of new insights about the planned roadmap. I’ve also had a chance to meet, talk and exchange opinions with other solution partners.
That chapter closed my monthly update. Thanks for reading this, and until the next time!