Author Archives: alankent
Why My Microsoft Surface Pro is not an iPad
I got a Microsoft Surface Pro as my new laptop replacement. Why did I go with a Surface? It was light (the same weight as my 12.9” iPad Pro so is good for traveling), has good specs (I have the 16GB RAM model which can drive a high a good resolution monitor), and it can […]
Windows PowerShell, Control-Z, and Kitematic
I quite like Kitematic for Docker. Its marked as “legacy” so it may go away one day, but until then it provides a nice GUI to spin up containers, launch a web browser pointing to your container, and so on. (I use it on Windows.) But there has been one thing bugging me. When I […]
Installing GraphIQL for use with GraphQL in PHP
I was playing with GraphQL (an alternative to REST) recently using a PHP library and was trying to get GraphIQL (note the extra “I”), a web based “IDE” for writing GraphQL queries. This blog post is to save anyone else who stumbles across this post some of the wasted pain I went through. TL;DR: Don’t […]
Amazon Echo 2?
Last November there were rumors of an Amazon Echo 2 coming with a 7 inch touch screen. I’m not sure I want one. I want one with a 20 inch screen instead! Wall mounted. Is 20 inches too big? For me I want to load up my family photos as well – so its a […]
A Personal Experience of Amazon Fresh
I was curious about the real life experience Amazon Fresh and the Amazon Dash wand, so I signed up for the 30 day free trial. This post shares my personal first impressions after my first day of use. (This post is not an “expert’s view after deep experience and analysis.) As background, Amazon Fresh is […]
Moving Magento DevBlog
Dear followers, in case you had not noticed, Magento has launched an official developer blog in the forums, and so most of my work related blogs will be going there now. I may do the occasional more “out there” blogs here still, but if you want to keep up with the latest from the Magento […]
Magento DevBox
“Magento DevBox” is the name for a new Magento 2 development environment under development. It is being built by Magento as a standard way to develop Magento 2 sites for developers on a local development machine (a laptop or desktop). It is built upon Docker, but should not be confused with other Docker projects intended […]
Headless Magento and Extensions
With the improved REST APIs in Magento, more “headless Magento” projects are emerging. This is where some other software provides the “glass” (presentation code) and Magento provides all the underlying ecommerce functionality (cart, taxes, shipping, order management, etc). But should extension developers do anything different in Magento 2 to work in such scenarios? Headless Magento […]
Personalization (Quick Note)
The Future Commerce podcast has some thought provoking interviews. A recent discussion was on the use of AI techniques and testing to try to automatically determine the best products to put forward first, instead of always showing the same category images. That is, adjust the experience for different users and compare their results to work […]
Unison for File Syncing
Virtualization technologies such as Docker, Vagrant, and Virtualbox provide new opportunities for pre-built development environment images. But where do your project files go? I personally prefer keeping my files on my local development machine (a laptop in my case) – it is generally faster to develop in (the IDE is faster) and it means I […]
