March's chapter of coding berlin deals with the new ways to run electronic commerce applications. After 20 years of installing, configuring and hacking into shop systems until they more or less did what has been requested, we have moved on towards "api first" approaches or completely decoupled service components - insiders commonly denote this as "headless" commerce.

For this meetup we've found 3 experienced speakers from around Europe (thank you so much, Pierre and Patrick for travelling the long distance, and Marco for taking the U8 ;) ) who will introduce us into their take on headless.

Here's the agenda so far:

18:30 doors open
19:00 a warm welcome by coding berlin / why are we here today and who is Tom?
19:15 Patrick Blom: Why we decided to build our own commerce frontend
20:00 Marco Podien: Next-Gen Headless Commerce with Spryker Commerce OS
20:45 Pierre Martin: Federate headless systems + an unified GraphQL schema = modern frontends
21:30 panel discussion: AMA with the speakers & comparison of all approaches
22:00 have a drink on Turbine

If you have never been to a coding berlin meetup, let us shortly tell us what to expect:

- beverages & (most likely) snacks are free, as in free beer. For every retweet you give us / every colleague|friend you bring along, we order more pizza ;)
- all speakers will demonstrate their approaches along code samples and demos. No marketing, not feature tour, no emotional videos, just tales from the practice
- the audience is the friendliest you can imagine (opinionated statement, but true!)
- your feedback is always appreciated, you most likely may ask questions during each talk. And of course afterwards
- in between the talk slots you'll find time for conversation. Some might call it "networking".
- we're recording and live streaming the session (from 1 perspective). The stream's URL will be announced shortly before the meetup.

Here are all the details for our talks that night:

Patrick Blom (SHOPMACHER)
Why we decided to build our own commerce frontend

Between monolith and microservice: Patrick talks about SHOPMACHER’s learnings when decoupling a common eCommerce software like OXID or Shopware for a separated frontend and why they think this is a great way to go if you're working with enterprise customers.

Marco Podien (Technology Evangelist, Spryker Commerce OS)
Next-Gen Headless Commerce

In a world of ever evolving customer touch points you need to be prepared to keep pace with unpredictable scenarios. The headless approach of the Spryker Commerce OS Glue API allows you to effortlessly react to this evolution and satisfy current and next generation frontend solutions on top of a battle-tested commerce infrastructure. Marco will provide us with the big picture and in depth code examples of how you can use these powerful tools to be prepared for any commerce requirement.

Pierre Martin (lead developer front-commerce.com)
Federate headless systems + an unified GraphQL schema = modern frontends

Pierre tells us how unified GraphQL schemas allow frontend developers to build and maintain complex e-commerce applications at scale, no matter which data source they’re using. His demonstration covers the creation of a simple React app that’s bound to an Apollo client using the lite version of front-commerce.

Our host: Turbine Kreuzberg
Being a full featured b2b commerce agency in the heart of Berlin, Turbine Kreuzberg is especially proud to host this meetup for us once again. And while it's still too cold to invite you for a bbq on the terrace, they'll load the fridges with beverages for us. Turbine Kreuzberg has a track record of hundreds of online shops and concentrates on high profile / b2b marketplace and integration scenarios for enterprise commerce over the last 3 years. They're among the largest Spryker integrators in the world and love to work with any kind of technology that makes the world a better place.