After having used and maintained my own Magento Docker environment for a few years now, I decided to move over to Mark Shust's Magento Docker environment. Only started to use it but I am already very excited as it is very flexible and customizable. Great job from Mark.
And it's open source so everyone can participate to file and fix issues (https://github.com/markshust/docker-magento/issues/309) and help each other out (https://courses.m.academy/courses/487758/lectures/9064617/comments/8671997) .
Fun fact: while doing my own study for the Magento Professional Developer Certification exam I checked my own Magento 2 FE course on LinkedIn learning to find out that it has been watched more then 4100 times and received almost 250 likes. I don't whether that's a good or bad score, but anyhow... I like it!
From March to August 2020 I worked on various Magento customizations to help a Magento Commerce merchant with their international aspirations. For this the merchant used and implemented the EShopWorld Magento integration.
A challenging time especially as the team was heavily trimmed down because of Covid-19. At a certain point I was the only freelance developer working on the project because the merchant team had to stand-down for some time. I have no problems to work independently so could work in the meantime on the various customisations that were required on top of the ESW module.
These customizations involved BE changes (enhancements, custom modules), FE changes (JS enhancements and overrides, template and layout XML) and maintaining the local Docker environment (nginx config) to make all 20 new international stores locally available and testable.
Development can't be separated from the context you're developing in. Proper documentation (in code and in for example Confluence) can provide the necessary context for now, but even more important, for later (why did we do it this way?). So as part of this project I also documented the architectural decisions and made an overview of all ESW module settings and Magento configurations for the 20 stores in Confluence. ESW depends on both default Magento configurations (like allowed countries, currencies) and ESW specific settings so documenting the what and why provided the necessary context to all stakeholders (dev and business) in the company.
While still in lock-down and working from home, the team eventually completed a successful go-live and international launch as planned.
During February and March 2020 I was responsible for the FE migration of a multi store and heavily customized multi theme Magento Commerce store.
This involved
This was an extensive job given the many customizations and overrides within the various themes. Luckily my years of experience with Magento upgrades helped a lot here (being able to extract a good 'diff' of all files, being able to assess what must and what must not be updated, understanding implications of changes and documenting this all in Confluence so creating a good reference for future upgrades).
The result: a smooth upgrade and launch without any production issues. Mission accomplished!
In December 2019 and January 2020 I worked on a project to migrate Magento 2.2.x Bluefoot content and custom content types to Magento 2.3.3. Pagebuilder. This is for an international ecommerce fashion merchant, a content heavy multi site store with lots of beautiful and carefully crafted content and Bluefoot customizations that all needed to be ported. So in addition to coding the custom PageBuilder migration and content type modules, this also involved extensive consulting with e-commerce delivery management and content team, to prepare for a smooth go live. Making sure that the pages still looked as smooth after migration as they did before. Which we succeeded in!
Development concerning a Magento 1 to Magento 2 Commerce migration. I was part of a larger development team from an awarded Magento solution partner. A large project with highly customized BE + FE functionality. During the 9 months (February - November 2019) that I worked on this project, I was responsible for the global theme setup of the hybrid Magento2 FE theme (part M2 stack, part customized and modern SCSS, ES6 and React stack) , co-operated in updating the Webpack based FE build tooling (to be able to compile SCSS partials, ES6 and ReactJS components), worked on the React based checkout, and introduced new FE developers into the Magento 2 FE. I was also privileged to work as a hybrid BE / FE developer on account page functionality (product reviews and wishlist) where I did both the BE and FE work to enhance Magento's OOTB functionality. A great project to work on, a great team to work with!
"Build your own understanding and offer help where you can" .
Contributing to the future of Magento front-end, Magento PWA Studio, as an active member of the Magento Research PWA Studio Github team. Contributing code and documentation, and helping developers who get started by responding to Github issues.
Magento 2 Front-end development and consultancy for an international women's fashion store
4 years ago
A great remote job opportunity working 5 months on a Magento 1 to Magento 2 Commerce re-platform for a large international women's fashion store. I am part of a large (+20) professional team of in-house and external Magento developers, business analysts, UX specialists and testers. This requires both good development - and communication skills (communication is mostly done via Skype, Slack and Jira). The front-end requirements and designs are very detailed and well thought out, which requires eye for detail. The project uses modern front-end tooling and frameworks like Webpack, Gulp, Sass, ES6, Handlebars and React. In addition to the day to day front-end development I also work as consultant, advising the organisation about a short and long-term webperformance strategy.
Developing a Magento 2 theme for a Dutch building supplier’s B2B webshop, a complete B2B webshop built on Magento 2 Community including a custom product configurator.
Advising an IT public sector supplier on the front-end implementation of their to be released Magento 2 webshop. Based upon my advice they decided to remove the installed 3rd party theme and build a custom Magento 2 theme instead.
The course that I created and recorded for OSTraining last year has also been published on Lynda.com.
Consulting an international health supplements webshop for their Magento 2 theme development. Helping their international developers in developing a Magento 2 theme that is set up according to Magento 2 best practices and review their code before deployment to staging. To make sure current and future front-end developers will follow best practices I published a internal Magento 2 front-end developer guide in Atlassian.
Creating a full SSL Docker Magento 2 local development environment. The server stack is Nginx, PHP-FPM, MariaDB + Varnish. This environment allows me to quickly setup a reliable development environment running on any https:// development url, and with any possible server setup (e.g. PHP version) . This allows me to develop in an environment which is almost identical to the production server of a project.
Developing a Magento 2 Commerce custom theme for a well known Dutch sneaker store. In addition to developing the theme I also assist junior and medior theme developers in learning the Magento 2 front-end development and review their code to make sure the project will be delivered according to front-end and Magento 2 best practices.
Creating a Magento 2 training course for a Magento agency, aimed at traning front-end developers into the Magento 2 theming basics and best practices. Based upon the results of each developer I could advise the companies CTO on each developers Magento 2 readiness, where skills where missing and had to be teached.
Giving a Magento 2 theming workout to a group of professional front-end developers. Instead of me doing the talking the developers had to create their own custom Magento 2 theme on a local Magento 2 Docker based development environment. We started in a fresh room, which became quit sweaty during the day ;-) . This kind of class is a great assessment opportunity.
Creating and recording an English spoken video course on how to create and customize a Magento 2 Custom theme for an international Open Source training provider.
Refactoring a Magento 2 Custom Theme for a Dutch upcoming international woman's fashion brand. The webshop hadn’t been developed according to Magento 2 best practices by the former Magento agency, causing several issues. My assignment was to make the front-end stable again.
Giving a basic Magento 2 front-end training for a group of professional front-end developers. Learning them about the ins and outs of Magento 2 theming, the Magento 2 folder structure, how to setup a custom theme, grunt setup, LESS compilation, requirejs, jquery UI widget factory, knockoutjs basics, developer mode, production mode, deployment methods and common pittfalls. They realized Magento 2 theming has a steep learning curve, and requires more than just regular front-end skills but where enthusiastic and willing to give it a go by the end of the course.
Building a complete multistore M2 custom desktop + separate mobile theme (dynamic serving) for a Magento merchant migrating from M1 to M2.
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