Alexander Turiak is a Co-Founder of HexBrain and has vast development experience. He is an active member of Magento community. Recently, Cloudways got a chance to interview Alexander and asked him to share his views about common issues merchants face in Magento.
Alexander also shared his views about Meet Magento and why magenticians should attend these events. Alexander was also an attendee of Meet Magento in Leipzig in 2014 and he also attended the Meet Magento Switzerland hackathon as well. Read on to learn more about this awesome member of the Magento community.
Cloudways: Alex, you have vast experience on the development side. You are the co-founder of HexBrain. What are the common issues of managing business with a job? Share some work management tips with our readers.
Alexander: I consider myself primarily a developer, management is not my strong quality so I am sure there would be better interviewees to ask about the management tips.
Cloudways: You are a senior software developer in Vitafy and you previously worked in Atwix. What is the work motivation for being a part of these companies? What were your main challenges during your work and how did you solve them?
Alexander: While these companies are different by nature – a merchant and an agency respectively, for me, the main motivation is sharing the knowledge and daily collaboration with the team mates. The main challenges are facing a task none of the members had experience with before, that involves a research for finding the right approach and solution
Cloudways: Alex, you are a Magento Certified Developer. What are the most common questions among Magento users that you come across? What are the main issues that merchants face when managing a Magento store? How should a new entrant equip himself/herself with the Magento? How can they learn about Magento?
Alexander: Questions always vary, but the most common questions would probably be about choosing the proper environment for Magento to run. For the merchants, it is selecting quality extensions to implement the features while keeping the shop robust and secure.
For starters in Magento development, I would recommend reading books and blog posts before jumping straight to the coding. Some basic knowledge of the Zend framework comes handy as well.
Cloudways: You are an active contributor at Github. What are the advantages of using Github for developers? There are several active communities of Magento. Do you participate in the discussions at these social communities?
Alexander: GitHub is a great platform which empowers sharing of code and fast-track collaboration. It allows getting latests updates of code, submitting issues and pull requests. This is also one of the social communities I participate in, other one is Twitter
Cloudways: It is a fact that there are a lot of other content management systems available for ecommerce solutions in the market. Magento is the most popular platform for ecommerce development. What are some of most important competitive advantages of using Magento?
Alexander: It’s not a secret that Magento is popular because of its big and friendly community. But also, there are hundreds of extensions that are implementing various improvements and features, including support for many payment gateways and shipping carriers.
Cloudways: You have been an attendee of Meet Magento events. What are the benefits of these type of events? How would you describe Meet Magento events for newbies who want to connect themselves to the Magento Community? Share some your most memorable moments from any Meet Magento event 🙂
Alexander: Main benefit of these events for me is meeting all those Magento developers, known previously only virtually or by meeting new folks. Having a discussion with people sharing common interests is always exciting too. The most memorable moment for me would be my first german Meet Magento in Leipzig in 2014, where at Hackathon pre-party I met and made great friends.
Cloudways: Magento 2.0 Beta is on the market. What do you expect from the latest release? Do you think Magento 2 will have a great impact on ecommerce sales? Will we see a complete overhaul of Magento’s frontend and back-end operational mechanism?
Alexander: I didn’t dig much into Magento 2 yet, but there seems to be a lot of work going towards releasing a stable version. The community has also started sharing the knowledge in conference talks and blog posts. It’s hard to predict if it will be a huge success and how fast the new version will be adopted, but it’s clear that it will gain some good traction as an ecommerce platform for upcoming years.
Cloudways: Do you foresee a total overhaul in Magento’s functionality and infrastructure? What are the 3 things / functions, you would like to change in Magento’s frontend?
Alexander: Clearly not in Magento 2, however, some of the parts were significantly reworked. Frontend wise would be nice to see good customization abilities, great performance and SEO improvements
Cloudways: Alex, let’s put Magento aside for a bit and talk about your personal interests 🙂 I follow you on Twitter and I saw you love music. Which genre of music do you listen to? Who are your favorite musicians?
Alexander: I like diverse genres, most commonly with post-metal, post-rock, electronic and ambient flavours. I can’t set apart a musician, as normally I favourite a band as a whole. For last years, this band for me is Rosetta from Philadelphia, USA. I consider myself a fan of band called Tool as well
Cloudways: Magento’s ecosystem is built around extensions and modules. Name five of the most important extensions that you recommend?
Alexander: These will be mostly developer oriented: Redis extensions from Colin Mollenhour, AOE Scheduler and Profiler from Fabrizio Branca, n98-magerun by Christian Münch
Cloudways: Every one of us likes to follow some influencers. From whom do you get inspiration? Name some top Magento influencers who have inspired you.
Alexander: Vinai Kopp and Ivan Chepurnyi – these guys greatly helped me in establishing myself as Magento developer in 2011 by showing the friendly examples of knowledge sharing and community spirit. They also show lots of “out of the box” thinking in their presentations these days. There were of course many other inspirations since then.
Cloudways: Cloudways provides 1-click Magento installation. Experience the fabulous speed of your cloud server on Cloudways Cloud Platform. I’d highly appreciate it, if you have any suggestions or feedback about the Platform.
Alexander: I didn’t try the platform but in general cloud platforms are very promising. Not every merchant have enough knowledge or in-house experts to run on, e.g. AWS. With proper guidance and expert help this would allow to have optimized and scalable shops.
Abdur Rahman
Abdur Rahman is the Magento whizz at Cloudways. He is growth ambitious, and aims to learn & share information about Ecommerce & Magento Development through practice and experimentation. He loves to travel and explore new ideas whenever he finds time. Get in touch with him at [email protected]
