Winter training, February 2018

Winter training, February 2018

March 3, 2018personal journal3 min read

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.

Parkrun at Richmond Park, London!

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.

Nice, sunny afternoon run in Richmond Park, London
Nice, sunny afternoon run in Richmond Park, London

Bonus, I’ve spotted a group of deer, freely roaming quite close to the path where I was running. Great experience!

A group of deer in Richmond Park, London

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 ;-)

Full blown winter in London!

Magento Partner Kickoff meeting - ACHIEVE 2018

I’ve joined Magento Partner Kickoff meeting as creativestyle is a solution partner of Magento.

Magento ACHIEVE 2018

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!

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