Tobias Hartmann, a Magento front end developer currently working in Sitewards GmbH, shares his journey so far in Magento in this interview. Tobias shares why he chose Magento over other ecommerce providers and shares his valuable tips for merchants that can help them in making their Magento store faster.
This interview is not only about Magento, but also has some great tips for climbers and Tobias shares in detail his experience of Rock Climbing. To a question about Meet Magento’s effects on the community, Tobias said that “The Meet Magento is a great event, too, don’t get me wrong, but it is more interesting from the Marketing and business growth part.” Interesting. Read more to find out interesting insights in from the Magento World.
Cloudways: Tobias, you work for Sitewards as a Front End Developer with 1 Year 9 months experience. What challenges did you face in this time? How did you start your career with Magento?
Tobias: I started working with Magento, without any knowledge, help or training, before joining Sitewards. In that Project, I had no idea of what I was doing there and the most problematic thing was that Magento seemed quite overwhelming, with all that Template files. So the first challenge was to find parts, which should be modified, in theses giant haystack of files. The outcome of the Project was, for sure, a working shop.
Looking back, I can say that I did everything wrong I could do, but it was a great experience. As I joined Sitewards, I directly had Training for Magento Fundamentals with Vinai in Berlin, which I would recommend to every developer starting Magento. With respect to my previous knowledge about Magento, I had a lot of facepalm and enlightening moments in that training. From then on, I knew which files I have to modify and work with. So I think this is the biggest Challenge with Magento and there’s not “a way” to go, but a lot of ways you shouldn’t go.
After I managed that first challenge and became more comfortable with Magento, I started with optimization on how to work with the Frontend, like getting rid of CSS usage. We are working a lot with the Bootstrap Framework so I started to use less to find a better and more maintainable way to write styles for Magento. Writing Styles and HTML for Magento was probably the next big challenge, because I had to decide if I should rewrite a lot of Templates or take Magento existing CSS classes and HTML. If there is enough budget, I would recommend to rewrite important HTML files, but there are again a lot of good ways to go, especially if you work with frameworks like Bootstrap. Regarding this, I gave a talk this year on meet magento switzerland, the slides can be found here and the article I wrote about that, nearly a year ago, can be found here.
And the Challenge about optimizing the Magento Frontend isn’t done yet, there is still a lot which can be done, especially for loading all that Javascript and CSS files, to make Magento faster.
About Magento Challenges, there were a lot of other Challenges during that time. I was working in small Agencies before, where I was nearly the only Developer, so I was focused to deliver and did not dedicate myself to improve coding. This was hitting me very hard, especially during the first year of Sitewards, where we were doing Architectural coding. The good thing was that we do everything in team, so I learned architectural coding very fast by the help of all the great people there with pair programming, code reviews with a lot of useful feedback, pointing me to some good books and articles, regular dev share sessions and explanations.
Cloudways: What is the main reason for choosing Magento? What’s your suggestion for newbies who want to learn Magento? Could you recommend a useful platform for Magento training?
Tobias: Well, I actually did not choose Magento, I only knew that I want to go again in a bigger agency and I found Sitewards, so I chose a Company, which is working with Magento. But Magento was a small part of my decision, because I wanted to do something better than just “Websites”. After I digged deeper into Magento, I realized that it is much more than just a software for ecommerce, for example, this awesome community, so I was content with my decision.
Learning Magento can be very interesting and exciting, I would recommend the Trainings from MagentoU especially done by a Trainer, attending the Conferences around the World, reading Articles from that great Community and especially talking to the Communities peoples.
Cloudways: Nowadays, Magento is a very popular ecommerce platform. What are some useful front end features in Magento 1X for developers?
Tobias: Magento is so packed full of features that it hardly to single them out. I guess the best feature I like about Magento is it’s flexibility. We have a lot of different needs in displaying shop Data and a lot of that can be done with onboard features, which is great. If a system is setup, the feature of doing the structure via xml gives the Frontend a lot of power, because you can reuse a lot of things displaying your data with just some lines of xml configuration, like displaying static contents or product lists. Not only that, it’s very easy to create new landing pages with the use of CMS pages or Category pages, which is a very big thing for nearly every project.
Cloudways: Tobias, being an experienced Magento developer, you must have first hand knowledge about the challenges being faced by merchants and online visitors alike. What would you suggest to make things easier for the end-users?
Tobias: Good Question! Guess I would need a Designer here to answer that much better. I think, the biggest challenge, which are still big topics in e-commerce are: how to serve the shop fast, how to lead the visitors to the pages they want, how to actually sell products to the visitors and to make them fans of your shop or label.
In all that cases, the building of ecommerce website, is a lot more advanced as compared to brick shops. Well, it depends on the Client and the Target Group, but you should think about testing your shop a lot. What that means is, you should prototype testing with a target group. Do usability testing, do continue testing and analyse visitor data, after ecommerce is launched.
The most important bit is that you should never throw away the data, bring it to your project team and ask them every time about their opinions, too. This should then solve the biggest Problems of Visitors and Merchants or point out where the real Problems hide.
Cloudways: Meet Magento is the best platform to engage ourselves with the Magento community. Did you attend any Meet Magento? In your opinion, what are the advantages of attending Meet Magento events for newbies who want to connect with the Magento community?
Tobias: Till today, I attended only Meet Magento Switzerland this year. I’ve to say, so far, that the other Events like the MageUnconf, gave me more insights on Code and System relevant things and a better place to meet the Developer Community.
The Meet Magento was a great event, too, don’t get me wrong, but it was more interesting from the Marketing and business growth part. Sure, you meet there a lot of the developer Community, too, with a lot of possibilities to talk to them and hear some good tech talks, but it was not so personal like, for example, the MageUnconf in Berlin.
But it was very great to see and hear, what is going on with Magento, all over the World, talking with People about the future of commerce and such things. But Meet Magento might be a better event for people who are already working with Magento. For new People, especially if they want to give a talk, too, I would heavily recommend the smaller Conferences and Unconferences.
Cloudways: Magento 2 r-c is in the market. What are your thoughts about the frontend of Magento 2? What are your expectations of Magento 2 as a frontend developer?
Tobias: I looked into Magento 2 and it is a very huge step forward in terms of architecture, specially the Modular structure it uses for the Modules. That was one of my expectations for Magento 2.
For the Frontend, my feelings are a bit mixed. I like that now less is supported by system, but I don’t like that they invented such a big Style-Framework. For now, it seems to be very hard to use another Framework, since the compilation of the frontend file is part of the core, but maybe I did not find the right settings now. My expectation here, was to be more open to other Frameworks and to make it more easy to build them in, which currently looks unmet.
But I really like the steps forward in terms of javascript. jQuery is now in and even Requirejs, which totally surprised me in a positive way, this will bring javascript development in Magento a big step forward.
Cloudways: You have vast experience on the development side. Magento uses extensions and modules. Which five extensions would you recommend for each Magento web store to deploy?
Tobias: Firstly, I want to recommend the use of tools like Modman and Composer, to make your ecommerce shop more modular. Some of the extensions we use at Sitewards are:
The Webcomm Boilerplate for Bootstrap, which provides your online shop with all the Styles you need so start with a Bootstrap styled Boilerplate-Theme.
FireGento Logger
SMTP Pro by Ashley Schroder
Magemonkey Mailchimp extension, to have a better control about your Newsletters.
The Ikonoshirt Extended Account Navigation, to work quickly with the User Account Navigation.
But we have a lot of small extensions developed internally, which we use across all our projects and a lot of our Projects require special customizations, so there are just a few other external extensions we use.
Cloudways: On the lighter side of life, I follow you on Twitter and you mentioned there that you are climbing addicted? Would you share some climbing tips and experiences with our readers?
Tobias: Yeah that’s true, climbing is the best way to do sport and refresh my mind while meeting friends. Climbing totally clears my mind, well, it has to, because if you are in the middle of a route, thinking of something else, you might fall. The mind is kinda forced to be clean and focused, even if there is a Rope holding you or a soft floor, if you fall.
On the other side of the sport and “Danger” of climbing, there are a lot of great people that you meet who have a calming mindset. You get to relax and come back to nature, especially if you go out on the real Rocks, just with a Tent.
For all who are interested in climbing I can just say: do it. At best, you should have or ask some people to climb with you in the beginning, there’s a lot you have to think about, but the people will tell you everything.
A big Bonus of Climbing is, that it is not very expensive, the only thing you need at the beginning are Shoes. It’ll take a while to find the perfect Shoes but you should take that time and don’t buy cheap ones, because they’re very important. With the wrong shoes you’ll definitely fall off the wall. The Shoes have to fit perfectly, means there should be no air between your skin and the shoe and they should hurt while walking. Because of their size, climbing shoes are not for walking.
I guess the best tip for beginners would be that they should not fear climbing. Because, it is only dangerous if you react mindless. You should have trust in the materials you use, especially the shoes. You can try climbing in a Hall, which is really safe but you should go out as soon as possible because it’s not comparable to Hall climbing and the feeling of the Rocks in your hands is so amazing.
Cloudways: Everyone has some inspiration behind their success. Name some people from the Magento community who have inspired you the most with their work?
Tobias: That’s a very hard Question because the whole community itself is so inspiring and I generally don’t like and want to be a fan, because we’re all doing great. But, there are some who helped and inspired me a lot. I think I shouldn’t tell the whole list, so I will point out only three.
At first I would name Tobias Zander, who was my challenge in Codereviews and in architectural coding in Sitewards, pushed me to give my first talk and a lot more. He is really a great Team-Lead, a great speaker, a good Trainer and Mentor and he is still inspiring me with his startups and the way he works, looking outside of a box and taking everything as a chance.
Then Vinai Kopp, who gave me the kickstart to Magento with the Fundamentals Training, who does a lot of awesome work and give great talk in the Community.
The next person is David Manners who is working at Sitewards, too. Funny, I am thinking of which words would describe him best and what exactly inspires me, but it’s hard to tell, because nearly everything does. I really enjoy the way he do talks, the way how he faces problems, makes decisions, find solutions but still be somehow relaxed and focused.
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]
