Meet Magento Netherlands 2024: Where LIQUIDLAB Began

On 31 October 2024 we were at Meet Magento Netherlands 2024, at LIEF Amsterdam. Organised by Mage-OS Nederland, it calls itself the largest Magento event in the country: one day from 09:00 to 23:00, with lunch, dinner, cocktails and the afterparty included, and free entry for anyone who owns or works for a Magento shop, according to the event site.

It was our first Meet Magento and the day LIQUIDLAB began: the conversations there started the processes we still work by today. Below are four things we brought home, plus four checks you can run this week.

Why an event like this matters

At a Meet Magento you share a room with the people who build Magento, Hyvä and Mage-OS, and with the agencies that use them every day. Questions you would otherwise put in a ticket, you ask over a coffee, straight to the best people in the ecosystem. What we have at LIQUIDLAB today became possible because we went to events like this one.

Hyvä and Mollie launch Hyvä Commerce

The moment of the day was the Hyvä announcement: Hyvä Commerce, a product suite built on top of Magento, with new features in both the admin and the storefront and a commitment to keep up with platform updates. Mollie becomes the default payment provider, embedded right in the checkout, and the beta programme was announced for early 2025, according to the 31 October 2024 announcement.

The Hyvä booth put it plainly: "The next step in evolutionary eCommerce is here." For a Magento merchant, the message is that Hyvä no longer stops at the theme: it wants to cover the admin and the payments too.

Automatic Magento updates: a GDPR-safe dump in 14 minutes

The most practical technical talk of the day was about Magento updates that run on their own. On the slide, a GitHub Actions job called "create-development-dump" finished in 14 minutes: it downloads the latest backup, starts MySQL and imports the database, sets up PHP and the Composer dependencies, runs a GDPR dump and uploads the result to S3. The rest of the pipeline used DDEV and automatically generated patch files.

Why it matters: a copy of the production database without personal data, rebuilt automatically, lets you test an update on real data without breaking GDPR. And if the pipeline takes 14 minutes, you can run it for every update, not once a quarter.

RUMvision: Speculation Rules, ready to use on Hyvä

RUMvision talked about web performance, and one slide stayed with us: a short "speculationrules" block that asks the browser to prerender links in the store, with "eagerness" set to "moderate". Next to the code, the Hyvä logo and the line "Supports it right out of the box!".

On desktop, "moderate" means the page starts loading once the pointer rests on a link for 200 ms, according to the Chrome documentation. By the time the customer clicks, the page is already prepared.

Hypernode: four risks before any new feature

Hypernode showed how they decide what to build. The "Addressing Risks" slide split every idea into 4 risks:

• Value: will customers actually want to buy or use this?
• Usability: even if it is valuable, it has to be intuitive and accessible.
• Feasibility: can the team build it within the limits of time, resources and technology?
• Viability: does it support the wider goals of the business?

A second slide showed their framing document for a problem: why we solve it, why now, which trade-off we make and how much the impact is worth in money over a given period. The focus was on "outcome", not "output". For reading, they recommended "Inspired" and "Continuous Discovery Habits". That is 4 questions to ask before the first line of code, for any new feature in a store.

What else was on stage

According to the Alumio recap, the day also included:

• EasyToys, who opened the day with their branding campaigns;
• Strix, with a wine marketplace built in one month;
• Emico and Zitmaxx, on AI and product discovery;
• Amac, the largest Apple Premium Reseller in the Netherlands, on moving from Joomla to Magento 2;
• Dotdigital, on the website as an engagement hub, and NewBees, on newcomers joining the Dutch workforce.

Mage-OS closed the day, with plans for 2025 already underway.

Halloween at LIEF

The event fell on 31 October, so the evening had a Halloween theme: burgers with red buns and black sesame for dinner, and skeleton hands right on the welcome sign.

The band Still Blue played on stage, and the party went on late into the evening.

What you can do this week

• Test data: check whether your team works on a copy of the production database with personal data anonymised. On the slide, the whole job took 14 minutes.
• Navigation: if your store runs on Hyvä, test Speculation Rules on a few category pages. On desktop, prerendering starts after 200 ms of hover.
• New features: before the next feature, run it through the 4 risks: value, usability, feasibility, viability.
• Events: pick at least one Magento event a year. At MM NL 2024, people who own or work for a Magento shop got in for free.

Update, October 2026: on 10 November 2025, the Hyvä theme became free and open source, details in our post on Hyvä going open source. Since then we went back to LIEF for Meet Magento Netherlands 2025, had our first stand, at GPeC SUMMIT, were a Bronze Sponsor at Meet Magento Italy 2026 and attended Meet Magento France 2026. On 5 November 2026 we are back at Meet Magento NL 2026.

Thank you

Thank you to the Mage-OS Nederland team for a day that, for us, was a beginning. And thank you to the speakers who put real code, pipelines and documents on their slides, not just promises.

Want to know whether your Magento store can test updates on anonymised data or use Speculation Rules? Book a free strategy call and we will tell you what is worth doing first.