I think everyone who attended would agree that Magento Imagine 2012 was a fantastic event.

While I did my best to cram my brain with every insightful and useful bit of information, the following items for me were the highlights.

1. “People, Product, Profit … In that order” – Jim Fitzgibbon
2. Responsive Design for Magento (one design, any device) – Brendan Falkowski (view presentation)
3. Yes, Magento can scale – Daniel Potzinger (view presentation)

Jim Fitzgibbon told us how a culture of “”People, Product, Profit” propelled Four Seasons from being a small chain of hotels with 3 locations in Canada to a international first-class resort empire.  Four Seasons even goes so far as to invite their competition to come interview folks they are forced to layoff. “Do unto others as you would have them do to you” and “trust your employees”…this advise is highly valuable to anyone wishing to keep their top talent around and I’ve seen it work just was well for programmers as I’m sure it does for hotel staff.

With the proliferation of devices website are now viewed on, responsive design allows sites to simply respond to the display constraints of any device.  So instead of building apps or device specific websites, sites that are built using responsive design work for all devices no matter what the constraint.  Brendan, sign me up to buy your first Responsive Magento theme…I’m sold.

Daniel Potzinger showed us how a Magento installation leveraging the hosting power of Amazon EC2 can process 5,000 simultaneous requests while maintaining a overall affordable hosting cost….one word…sweet.

Checkout out the pictures wall