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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

  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 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 […]

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 […]

In this post I describe the proposed Magento 2 recommendation for managing the source code of a Magento 2 project. Proposed, because this is my unofficial blog; recommendation, because there is no requirement to follow this approach. But I have some more blogs coming shortly that assume this approach. tl;dr: We ship a ‘.gitignore’ file […]

I sometimes get asked “so what do the internal Magento developers use when developing?” We do not mandate a particular approach, but there is an unofficial Vagrant box that a number of the internal developers use now. Alex made it public, but it might not be well known: https://github.com/paliarush/magento2-vagrant-for-developers “Hey, Alan! I though you were a Docker […]