After a great party the first night, the conference activities were ready to start. We began with a key note from the Sean Scofield, CEO of Spree.

Spree 2.0 and Beyond

Sean showed us a very different Spree platform from what we were used to with Spree 1.3. With the 2.0 release, too many things were improved, and one of the most important features in 2.0 is the separation of the Spree core, with Spree 2.0, the frontend and the backend are things apart from the Spree core, with that and with the great improvements in the API, you can create your own frontend using a javascript library such as Backbone.js, Ember.js or Angular.js without relying on the Spree frontend.

Introducing the Spree Integrator

The second talk was from the Spree CTO Brian Quinn, Brian talked about the first version of what they call Spree Integrator, which offers a way to connect your store with several third party applications using a message system. With Spree Integrator, any application that consumes JSON will be able to work with Spree Integrator.

Large Scale Migration to Spree: A Case Study

The next talk was given by Gregor MacDougall and Clarke Brunsdon, it was a very dynamic talk. They explained how they achieved, step by step, the migration of a big e-commerce app to Spree; very useful tips and experiences were shared.

Open Source War Stories

After lunch, Ryan Bigg, one of the Spree core contributors, gave us his talk called: Open Source War Stories, his talk was funny, he shared with us his experience managing the Spree contributions, he started telling us how the contributors to the project have been increasing since the last year, and also the quantity of issues, and how that made the task of maintaining the project a hard job. One of the solutions he found for this was to stop using TravisCI and use TeamCity as Integraton Server, due to the slowness of TravisCI.

Rails 4 In Action

After Ryan, it was Nick Gauthier's turn. It was a brief resume of the new awesome features that will come with the new Rails version. Even, he was actually using Rails 4 on his slides, he was using ActiveRecord::Live to switch slides from his cell phone, very interesting!.

Hugh & Crye: The (Re)Birth of an Online-only Brand

After a brief break, Alex Nemeroff started his talk with a case study of the rebranding and redesign of Hugh & Cry, he shared with us the lessons he learned and gave us many useful tips.

Magic Tricks of Testing

It was Sandy metz's turn, who as always, gave us an excellent talk, practically, she taught us to test in a nutshell, how not to hate our tests and how we should be doing our unit tests. Great talk from Sandy, as always, you learn something new.

Lessons from the Field: Scaling an E-Commerce Business

Adil Wali closed the conference with a very motivational talk, he told us how we need to think now about the e-commerce business, and tried to show us the big quantity of opportunities we have today because of the e-commerce business.

Spree conf and beyond

The significant growth of Spree is just a reflection of what is really happening now in the e-commerce business. Everyone wants to be selling something in the Internet, this is just the beginning and something great will happen soon and every one involved in the e-commerce business will have incredible benefits from that.

Thanks for the reading!