Author Archives: alankent
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 […]
Magento 2 Tool Chain
In this post I review the typical stages in a Magento 2 tool chain, from development to production. This tool chain is for sites using the Magento “development” and “production” modes, not the simpler “default” mode where you tend to operate directly on the site. There are variations, but I thought a useful to put […]
Magento 2 CSS Class Naming (Request for Feedback)
This blog post discusses a possible direction for allocating CSS class names in HTML markup. It briefly describes the current rules, then moves on to a proposal around the adoption of BEM (or a variant thereof). This relates to community work going on (led by SNOW.DOG) around exploring a Sass port of the Magento 2 […]
