Author Archives: alankent
Magento 2 Community Project: Moving from Less to Sass
What! After all these endless debates Magento 2 might move from Less to Sass?! TL;DR: Yes. History One of the original reasons for selecting Less over Sass was at the time there was no PHP implementation of a Sass preprocessor. There was also no clear winner between Less and Sass in the market. While this […]
Determining Marketplace Package Names
With Magento Marketplace, you can purchase extensions and have them added to your personal Magento Marketplace Composer repository, hosted at https://repo.magento.com. Using this repository you can access all Composer packages you have permission to access. This includes all CE packages, possibly EE packages (if you have a license), and any specific extensions you have purchased. […]
Development Environment Approaches Update (Quick Note)
A few people asked me recently on progress on “development environments”, which I am currently looking into. This is just a quick update because tweets are too short – especially for me!! There is not much new content here over previous posts. SDLC Phases Let’s first talk about the typical phases in development – the […]
Simulating Cache Hit Rates
Running performance benchmarks measures systems under real load, but takes a fair bit of effort. Simulations can help understand the characteristics of a system with a lot less effort (and somewhat less accuracy). For this blog post I knocked up a quick PHP script to simulate random hits to a page cache to explore the […]
Fastly and Magento
This is a quick post on some of the technical benefits of Fastly and how it can be used with a Magento store. This is not intended as an endorsement of Fastly over other CDN offerings – it is just some technical information on Fastly that I think is interesting. Note: Magento Cloud has announced […]
Vagrant vs Docker for Development?
I apologize in advance if this starts a religious war – that is not my intent. But I have been thinking hard about Docker versus Vagrant for building development environments. I wanted to share my current thinking and welcome constructive feedback. (And if you found this article at random on the web, the following discussion is […]
“Hey Magento, what is my stock level?”
I have a new girlfriend… at least that is what my wife has been telling me recently. When I got back from Imagine 2016 a bright shiny new Amazon Echo had arrived. I was looking forward to endless hours of fun trying to program up this new toy. I must admit I was a little […]
Cloud Based Development Environments
A few months back someone pointed me at cloud based PHP development environments. This was a new one for me. Really? Develop PHP applications in a web browser? Zero installation required? Are you serious? Well, after a few great technical discussions with the folks at Codeanywhere.com over the last few months, I am happy […]
Magento Shared Services
Magento 2 Digital Commerce (the traditional Magento web store) and Commerce Order Management (a SaaS offering from Magento) communicate using JSON over AMQP. This post describes some initial messages we support and our plans to open up the protocol to the wider partner and potentially extension developer ecosystem. Digital Commerce? Commerce Order Management? Huh? Magento […]
My Goals to Imagine
Not as cool as RoadToImagine.com, but I was reflecting on some personal goals to get done by Imagine. Note, I am not doing all the real work myself, but I at least wanted to raise awareness so can discuss with anyone interested at Imagine. Lots of things coming together! For lower end merchants E-book for […]
Alan Kent's Blog 