How is Magento doing these days? Just checking in as a former Magento developer who still loves Magento

Hi! My early career I did a lot of Magento 1 for smaller companies, then Magento 2 for larger companies at a agency. I sort of transitioned into headless + “enterprise” integrations, then other commerce systems / pure CMS implementations, then lots of middleware for various headless systems, then I did a lot more infrastructure and worked on a software product… and now I actually am not sure what I do anymore and am having a small middle age reset.

Now I feel really disconnected from Magento and I have no idea where Magento is these days, if it’s completely dead, if it’s essentially dead just still hanging on because of the cost of re-platforming, etc.

I also wonder about conferences – I’ve had the pleasure to attend 4 or 5 Magento Imagine conferences (for me it was a pleasure as a developer, I didn’t have to do any business stuff and just attended tech sessions I found interesting and ate lots of free food). I believe Adobe has combined Magento events with those for AEM, but are they still fun? I’ve also gone to a few AEM conferences (before the Adobe acquisition) and didn’t enjoy them nearly as much.

I’ll say that I really loved Magento, loved the community, and frankly I loved developing with Magento. Even Magento 1 (though I must preferred Magento 2 in most ways) I really loved, and still love. Part of the reason is I felt like you were always on rails, there were generally patterns to do things, and after understanding the system and how it worked in general it felt like you could do anything you want, while still having clear boundaries. You had an entire world of systems to work within and build on top of, and once you understood where the landmines were (and which features to completely ignore like the plague) you really felt like everything was possible with some time.

These days I write a lot of TypeScript, and while I don’t mind it, I feel like Magento 2 and some of it’s libraries (Symphony IIRC) felt like a good mix of modern / “cowboy” software engineering mixed with some of the more boring, slow, older school Java vibe, which really suited me personally. Now I feel like everything I do is built on top of quicksand and I have no idea what 95% of the dependency tree is doing when I pull in an NPM package.

I sometimes think about trying to go back to Magento development but I think I might have gone too brogrammer / cowboy with all of the node and such I’ve been writing lately. I’m also perhaps jaded and feel like the best software is the software somebody else writes and maintains, e.g. Shopify or Squarespace or whatever. I also have VERY little interest in modern Magento 2 FE development.

So, what’s the Magento world like these days for those that live in it?

Is there a Magento 3? Or any major technology shifts? Has the PaaS / Adobe managed services world killed Magento on prem?