Your host: Joseph Maxwell, Founder and CEO of SwiftOtter, Inc.Special Guest: James Cowie, Solutions Architect at Inviqa

This is one of those long-awaited episodes that we were finally able to record and we're so happy it finally happened! It was an honor to chat with James Cowie. Listen in to this episode to hear James' recommendations for getting the most out of your code reviews, how to stay fresh with the knowledge you have siloed, as well as his suggestions for being a successful developer! Thinking like a 5 year old child can benefit us all

Show Notes

0:00 Intro

1:40 An average day for James as a Solutions Architect

2:35 A little about the organization within Inviqa

3:46 Code reviews

5:00 What James learned from one of his first memorable code reviews as a developer

5:59 Code reviews should be more than just a critique

9:13 James' tips for submitting the best possible code reviews

13:22 BDD and Behat

16:58 Code previews before implementation- think like an architect

18:07 How to be sure the knowledge you gain isn't siloed

22:29 Getting ahead of problems that happen 12 months down the road

26:00 James' "What If" game to future proof solutions

28:44 The importance of building strong partnerships

29:30 James' suggestion for being a better developer

31:41 Outro

Connect with James: LinkedInTwitter

Connect with Joseph:LinkedInTwitter

https://swiftotter.comhttps://twitter.com/Swift_Otterhttps://www.facebook.com/SwiftOtterInc

Do YOU have an incredible debugging story to share? Send your story to [email protected] and you might be our next podcast guest!

This podcast exists to inspire, educate and entertain eCommerce developers who are serious about improving their skills and advancing their careers!

Have you joined the free SwiftOtter Slack community? It's exploding and we don't want you to miss out. You can join for free and get plugged into what might be the best group of collaborating developers around!

Your host: Joseph Maxwell, Founder and CEO of SwiftOtter, Inc.Special Guest: Talesh Seeparsan, eCommerce Security Consultant and Strategist

Security is one of those topics like taxes where we have to just do it. Talking to someone like Talesh Seeparsan about security on our Magento sites, however, totally changes the game! We say this every time, but this might be one of our favorite episodes to date! Talesh gives us some insight into some of the biggest hacks he has encountered, and some tips on how to prevent security breaches.

Show Notes

0:00 Show Intro

1:46 Some of the big names in eCommerce Security

3:50 A typical day for Talesh

4:59 Some common examples of poorly-written code

6:23 The cost of a bug like a security breach

9:06 Quantifying an average breach 12:01 "The mind of an attacker"

14:37 The importance of keeping your extensions up to date

18:20 Humans tend to be the biggest security risk

19:51 Writing regular expressions with security in mind

22:41 Magecart attack

24:51 A security breach due to a reused password

27:56 The value in whitelisting specific IPs

29:56 Outro

Connect with Talesh: LinkedInTwitter

Connect with Joseph:LinkedInTwitter

https://swiftotter.comhttps://twitter.com/Swift_Otterhttps://www.facebook.com/SwiftOtterInc

Do YOU have an incredible debugging story to share? Send your story to [email protected] and you might be our next podcast guest!

This podcast exists to inspire, educate and entertain eCommerce developers who are serious about improving their skills and advancing their careers!

Have you joined the free SwiftOtter Slack community? It's exploding and we don't want you to miss out. You can join for free and get plugged into what might be the best group of collaborating developers around!

Junior developers are a category of people we haven’t explored much on this podcast yet. In this episode of Smash the Bug, we’re changing that and talking with Alice Dean, a developer with Fisheye. The hunger and tenacity of junior developers is unmatched, and should not be overlooked when it comes to those we can learn from! Alice gives us some insight into what her day-to-day is like, and talks about a couple bugs she has smashed recently.

Show Notes

0:00 Intro

2:29 An average day for Alice

5:43 Making the jump from Technical Account Manager to Developer

7:10 Getting the first Magento certification

10:09 A recent invoicing bug

15:00 Recounting the troubleshooting steps that Alice took

16:09 The one line fix Alice used for this challenge

17:36 Using integration tests for troubleshooting

19:50 A custom product alert module issue with 2.4.4

23:29 When the error logs aren’t consistently providing helpful information

26:14 How to get Xdebug working on the CLI

29:37 Alice’s advice for others getting started as a developer

32:18 Outro

 

Connect with Alice:LinkedInTwitter

Connect with Joseph:LinkedInTwitter

https://swiftotter.comhttps://twitter.com/Swift_Otterhttps://www.facebook.com/SwiftOtterInc

Do YOU have an incredible debugging story to share? Send your story to [email protected] and you might be our next podcast guest!

This podcast exists to inspire, educate and entertain eCommerce developers who are serious about improving their skills and advancing their careers!

Have you joined the free SwiftOtter Slack community? It's exploding and we don't want you to miss out. You can join for free and get plugged into what might be the best group of collaborating developers around!

This episode of Smash the Bug is part 2 of the conversation with Joseph and Igor Miniailo! It was such a sip from the firehose that it needed to be split into two parts! In this part, Igor delves further into the backstories and complexities behind the scenes when it comes to modularity, and coupling and cohesion. There are even already plans for a future episode to explore other related aspects!

Show Notes

0:00 Show Intro

0:59 Modularity and related rules

3:09 Magento 1 to Magento 2, and the differences in the dependencies

5:36 “Honest dependencies” and not hiding the external dependencies

6:47 Cyclomatic complexity

9:30 The C.R.A.P. Metric

12:14 Back to modularity, coupling and cohesion

15:30 Eric Evans’ Big Blue Book, and domain-driven designs

17:12 Most modules have a dependency on the catalog, and the related challenges

20:28 Sometimes the seemingly simple questions have a lot more complexities behind the scenes, and take a lot of information before you can answer them.

24:49 The other aspects to explore to fully answer the modularity question, including MSI and coarse grain/fine grain API; the making of a future episode of Smash the Bug!

29:09 Outro

 

Connect with Igor:LinkedInTwitter

Connect with Joseph:LinkedInTwitter

https://swiftotter.comhttps://twitter.com/Swift_Otterhttps://www.facebook.com/SwiftOtterInc

Do YOU have an incredible debugging story to share? Send your story to [email protected] and you might be our next podcast guest!

This podcast exists to inspire, educate and entertain eCommerce developers who are serious about improving their skills and advancing their careers!

Have you joined the free SwiftOtter Slack community? It's exploding and we don't want you to miss out. You can join for free and get plugged into what might be the best group of collaborating developers around!

Imposter Syndrome and burnout; two very common feelings that most, if not all of us can relate to at some point. SwiftOtter’s own Łukasz Bajsarowicz joined us from Croatia for this really important talk. Łukasz shared his experience of getting into the IT world, and some of the personal challenges he has faced along this journey. Prioritizing our own mental health is easy to forget, but so incredibly important to do. Thank you, Łukasz, for your vulnerability in sharing these stories; we hope everyone takes these lessons to heart, and remembers to take time to check in on themselves, as well as their colleagues from time to time.

Show Notes

0:00 Show Intro

1:40 Łukasz’s journey into IT– turning a passion into a career

3:36 Sometimes it’s worth taking a chance on a career change because others may see your potential even more than you do

4:51 When furthering your education leads to new opportunities, and Imposter Syndrome

9:41 Unrealistic expectations can cause burnout in teams

11:30 How a positive company culture (and remote work) can completely change your team’s experience and mental health

13:20 Trying to make changes out of frustration instead of passion

18:12 How a sabbatical can put things into perspective

20:04 The importance of addressing mental health and how it can affect both your personal and professional life. Sometimes stepping away for a bit is the best thing you can do.

24:44 You have to remember to give yourself permission to address your burnout and get help. Leaders and other team members should also be aware and check in with their colleagues and help them take care of themselves

29:54 Imposter Syndrome can present itself in many contexts. Listening to the trustworthy external voices that remind you of your value can be very beneficial in working through Imposter Syndrome.

35:43 Sick leave is not just for lazy people. If you need to take some time off, you should utilize the time that is given.

Connect with Łukasz:LinkedInTwitter 

Connect with Joseph: LinkedInTwitter

https://swiftotter.comhttps://twitter.com/Swift_Otter https://www.facebook.com/SwiftOtterInc

Do YOU have an incredible debugging story to share? Send your story to [email protected] and you might be our next podcast guest!

This podcast exists to inspire, educate and entertain eCommerce developers who are serious about improving their skills and advancing their careers!

Have you joined the free SwiftOtter Slack community? It's exploding and we don't want you to miss out. Go to swiftotter.com/slack to join for free and get plugged into what might be the best group of collaborating developers around!

We’ve had some great talks in the past about Hyvä and its capabilities (listen to The Hyvä Revolution episode with Willem Wigman), but in this episode Alexander Galdin, Frontend Developer with ITdelight joined us to talk about actually customizing Hyvä for merchants! His in the trenches, boots on the ground perspective was really great to hear! This was an enlightening discussion with Alex, and we hope you learn as much about working with Hyvä as we did!

 

Show Notes

0:00Show Intro

1:17Life as a frontend developer

2:18Hyvä with a single Magento instance and multiple stores

5:04Understanding the basics of using Hyvä

8:15Strategies for having multiple stores

11:15There are pros and cons to any feature, and there are usually reasons for the design trade-offs

14:10Alpine.js, and some of the challenges

19:17Strategies Alex has figured out for overcoming some of the design trade-offs

23:59How to handle upgrades to to the modules

26:26Alex’s advice for frontend developers, and the importance of expanding your social networking circle

27:40The courage of those in Ukraine, and what we can learn from them

 

Connect with Alexander: LinkedIn

Connect with Joseph: LinkedInTwitter

https://swiftotter.comhttps://twitter.com/Swift_Otter https://www.facebook.com/SwiftOtterInc

 

Do YOU have an incredible debugging story to share? Send your story to [email protected] and you might be our next podcast guest!

This podcast exists to inspire, educate and entertain eCommerce developers who are serious about improving their skills and advancing their careers!

Have you joined the free SwiftOtter Slack community? It's exploding and we don't want you to miss out. Go to swiftotter.com/slack to join for free and get plugged into what might be the best group of collaborating developers around!

What an incredible privilege it was to speak with Igor Miniailo for the return of Smash The Bug! He has looked at Adobe Commerce from more angles than most of us can even imagine, so it was a tremendous honor to hear about some of the bugs Igor and his team have encountered and smashed recently! In part one of this discussion, Igor and Joseph share similar experiences on the challenges of replicating issues in order to fix them.Show Notes0:00Show Intro

 

1:28Who is Igor Miniailo? A day in the life of the Chief Architect for Adobe Commerce

 

2:52Scaling up to 300,000 orders per hour from 1,800 just a couple years ago for one merchant. Identifying and correcting bottlenecks on the database.

 

5:53Temporary tables for search functionality. When designing the commerce search functionality, they decided to make it agnostic to the possible search options.

 

12:41When you don’t know the full conditions where the bug is present, it can be challenging to replicate the issue and then fix it. Joseph shares a similar recent challenge; some problems can take so long to get to the solution, and the solution turns out to be easier than expected.

 

18:39Modularity. 'Why' is more important than 'how' in many situations– sometimes the solution doesn’t seem like the best option, but there is usually a good reason behind these decisions.

 

22:46Making it community contribution-based, and the benefit and success of doing so.

 

Connect with Igor: LinkedInTwitter

 

Connect with Joseph:LinkedInTwitter

https://swiftotter.comhttps://twitter.com/Swift_Otterhttps://www.facebook.com/SwiftOtterInc

 

Do YOU have an incredible debugging story to share? Send your story to [email protected] and you might be our next podcast guest!

This podcast exists to inspire, educate and entertain eCommerce developers who are serious about improving their skills and advancing their careers!

Have you joined the free SwiftOtter Slack community? It's exploding and we don't want you to miss out. You can join for free and get plugged into what might be the best group of collaborating developers around!

Your host: Joseph Maxwell, Founder and CEO of SwiftOtter, Inc.

Another informative episode of Smash the Bug with Joseph and his guest, Jesse Maxwell, who also happens to be his brother. There is a lot to catch up on as they discuss the latest news and how that impacts developers. They also jump into real-life challenges they face as an agency at SwiftOtter and how they dealt with them. Communication is more important than you might think especially working with clients. 

0:00

Show starts.

0:34  

Recent release of Chrome 100. 

1:30

Headworks. Vendor for modules has changed the way they are releasing or restricting their Composer repository. 

5:54

Events are happening again. Magento UK, etc. 

7:20

New Magento upgrade—should you do it? Magento 2.4.4 will be supported until November 2023. 

8:30

Joseph discussed a challenge they faced in their agency. A client’s products disappeared off the site. Their first course was to run the re indexer but it happened again. So they did it again. They finally drilled down to what it was. 

14:46

The fix: dependency injection!

16:18

Jesse was working on an app and had a pesky issue (losing data). The fix ended up taking less than 15 minutes. A co-worker suggested it. Sometimes, it’s good to do the obvious. 

20:15

Occam’s Razor

21:44

Communication. It’s a really important area. Internal conversation facilitates good merchant relationships. Communication is the foundation to the work we do.

24:25

Action oriented communication: making clear the purpose of the communication. 

26:16

How to drill down and be specific. Ping only the necessary people in comments. Ask questions too.

30:56

An important point is how you layout your communication. 

33:44

After you’ve written high quality communication, take a moment and re-read it. Put yourself in the recipient’s shoes. 

Connect with:

Jesse MaxwellLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bassplayer7/

Joseph Maxwell

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxwelljoseph/Twitter: https://twitter.com/swiftotter_joe

This podcast exists to inspire, educate and entertain eCommerce developers who are serious about improving their skills and advancing their careers! Have you joined the free SwiftOtter Slack community? It's exploding and we don't want you to miss out. Go to SwiftOtter.com/Slack to join for free and get plugged into what might be the best group of collaborating developers around!

Special thanks to TrendingAudio for our awesome theme music!

Your host: Joseph Maxwell, Founder and CEO of SwiftOtter, Inc.

We’re going to talk with Yarik Voronyi (Engineering Manager at Adobe), Russell Albin (Technical Principal Architect at Adobe), and Shane Herman (Senior Director of Customer Engineering). Today’s topic is on  sticking points with Commerce Cloud, the challenges people bring upon themselves when they are deploying solutions out to Commerce Cloud and what we can due to avoid the problems. 

0:00

Show starts.

 

1:40

Joseph asks his guests what the most common mistakes they see people making in Commerce Cloud. 

 

1:58 

Russell comes at the issue from the developer side. He sees a lot result from live inventory requests. He has cautioned people against it.  He encourages them to figure out what cadence is good enough (every 30 minutes, an hour, etc),and feed Commerce with the appropriate data. Otherwise, real time is always a problem. 

 

4:51

Yarik sees a lot of customers not pay attention to full page caching. He shares a solution to that.

 

7:00

Shane tells about how some of their clients are using GraphicQL. 

 

9:27

Joseph asks a question about GraphQL and caching. Shane says it doesn’t natively cache but they can use Get. 

 

10:33

Shane talks about how important it is todo so some self-help before you reach out to support. You can save yourself time and headaches.

 

12:38

Yarik describes the site analysis tool. 

 

14:49

Shane addresses extensions from the marketplace and things to watch out for.

 

17:26

Russell discusses ideal configurations. In your config.PHP, it dumps some of the config values, to help with the compilation time. You can also add post deploy hook, all of this info is in the Dev Docs. 

 

Google: Commerce Cloud Ideal State : for more info.

 

18:30

Yarik talks about indexers and index functionality. Extensions often invalidate indexers, and that causes issues in Commerce. 

 

Connect with:

Yarik Voronyi

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yarik-voronoy/

Russell Albin

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/russellalbin/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/RussellAlbin

Shane Herman

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shaneherman/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/robot_atx

Joseph Maxwell

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxwelljoseph/Twitter: https://twitter.com/swiftotter_joe

This podcast exists to inspire, educate and entertain eCommerce developers who are serious about improving their skills and advancing their careers! Have you joined the free SwiftOtter Slack community? It's exploding and we don't want you to miss out. Go to SwiftOtter.com/Slack to join for free and get plugged into what might be the best group of collaborating developers around!

Special thanks to TrendingAudio for our awesome theme music!

Your host: Joseph Maxwell, Founder and CEO of SwiftOtter, Inc.

 

Special Guest: Peter Jaap Blaakmeer, multi-certified Magento developer and CTO at Elgentos Commerce

 

Peter Jaap Blaakmeer is the kind of guest who needs no introduction. In fact, if you ever have a few free minutes and want to see something amazing, check out his resume on LinkedIn to see all of the different projects he’s worked on throughout the years. Having been a developer for over 15 years and achieved basically every certification he could possibly want, you could say this guy knows a thing or two about his craft. Peter has recently jumped into a pretty interesting project, and he was very kind to give us a glimpse into his world!

 

02:03

Peter’s 3 main roles as a CTO, beyond his first designation as a developer at heart. Elgentos’ unique client onboarding experience they provide for their merchants.

 

04:31

Cypress vs MFTF as a testing environment, from speed to integration.

 

07:18

Peter/Elgentos’ new client with three separate Magento installations with different php versions, and a long road to combining all three into one. 

 

11:24

How orders aren’t having to be merged, and why that would be a massive challenge.

 

12:50

A valuable Magento crypt key trick you won’t want to miss!

 

14:14

The intricate game plan Peter is using to get these websites all merged together (don’t miss this!).

 

20:53

Peter talks all of us through the original layout/scope, approaching this project, and what the new scoping system is looking like right now. Why Elgentos is strict with their “one website, one store view” rule.

 

30:01

Peter’s perspective on why this rare occasion is an opportunity for him, and a somewhat exciting challenge to run through, even though it’s frustrating. From import tools to unique tricks, Peter runs through the technical overlay that makes this project above many of his staff’s pay grade.

 

33:32

How Peter keeps his skills sharp and renews his excitement over new challenges, even after all these years. Truly, some things never change for some developers!

 

Connect with Peter:

LinkedIn

Twitter

 

Connect with Joseph:

LinkedIn

Twitter

This podcast exists to inspire, educate and entertain eCommerce developers who are serious about improving their skills and advancing their careers!

Have you joined the free SwiftOtter Slack community? It's exploding and we don't want you to miss out. Go to SwiftOtter.com/Slack to join for free and get plugged into what might be the best group of collaborating developers around!

Special thanks to TrendingAudio for our awesome theme music!