Everybody has dreams, but attaining them is not easy. But, there are some incredible individuals who through their determination, hard work, and passion make their dreams come true.
Miguel is one such individual, who at a very young age of 25, has become one of most well known certified Magento experts. A Magento core developer and a travelling geek (who has traveled 19 countries), he shares his candid opinions about the current trends in Magento industry and what future holds for the leading content management system for e-commerce websites. Currently, he is working at Santex, an organization known for developing cutting-edge and customized software solutions.
Cloudways: Being an experienced Magento developer, tell me what makes it the choicest CMS for you? What’s the story behind your success?
Miguel: Magento is by far the most flexible platform in the ecommerce market. It also has the best community I’ve seen and that is why I’m still working with Magento as my CMS/ERP of choice.
Cloudways: What is your finest accomplishment that you are really proud of? Is there any famous quote or motto that motivates you and helps to achieve more day by day?
Miguel: My finest accomplishment is to be among the 9% collaborators in Magento Stack Exchange. I live beyond Magento coding and I think giving back to the community is really important since I got most of my knowledge from there.
Cloudways: The release of much-awaited Magento 2.0 is just a few days away. Do you think it is going to be something “higher-than-expected” or just tweaked update of existing Magento version? What are your favorites from the beta release?
Miguel: Magento 2.0 is something I didn’t check as much as I wanted to. I made a pull request and dig the new module structure which seemed familiar to me as a 1.X.
Cloudways: There are several ecommerce CMSes available. What challenges do you think Magento might face in 2015? In your opinion, what will be the vector of ecommerce development in the 2015?
Miguel: In my opinion, Magento has no competitors in the market. Shopify, for example, is a fine platform but it is not as flexible as Magento. Same goes with any other platforms, they are easy to use but the flexibility Magento has can’t be compared with any other ecommerce platform at the moment. Small merchants won’t use Magento but a SaaS, but I don’t expect huge stores to be using something else than Magento or a hosted CMS.
Cloudways: Tell something about your interests other than Magento. I noticed on your Twitter profile that you are yoga guru.
Miguel: I’m not actually a Yoga guru, that is just a mock to those guys who define themselves as some-technology Guru. I’m simply a developer trying to learn as much as I can while working. I particularly like travelling and I have been working remotely for more than 3 years now. That is what I do most of my time. I travel a lot!
Cloudways: Magento is undoubtedly the most elaborate, yet complicated content management system. What would be your advice to the newbies? How to get hold of Magento? Where to start?
Miguel: Magento has a pretty big learning curve, that is true. My advice to a beginner is: to start digging Magento 2 instead of Magento 1.X since Magento 2 is the future of the platform. To begin with, there are a lot of resources and it is always a good idea to follow the big guys in Magento, like Ben Marks, Allan Storm, Allan Mac Gregor, Kalen Jordan, Classy Llama, the almighty Marius among others. Blogs like Inchoo do help a lot and Magento Stack Exchange is the place to be if you are learning.
Cloudways: Magento based websites are vulnerable to security threats such as hack attacks, product duplication, credit card misuse, and data theft etc. In your opinion, what can be done to prevent these security issues? Is there any recovery plan in place for such mishaps? How one can avoid browser Javascript / CSS caching In Magento?
Miguel: Security issues can be addressed most of the time by keeping the software up-to-date and by keeping payment methods separated from the Magento implementation (or being PCI-compliant) to avoid having sensible data stolen from your server. The latest versions of PHP and MySQL tend to be more secure and having payment gateways like PayPal or Stripe is useful too. David Walsh has a pretty good post to avoid static resources being cached here.
Cloudways: Provide us with the names of some important people whom you follow to get all the updates of the Magento industry? What are the things that inspired you most about them?
Miguel: I mentioned some of them and I don’t want to forget any of them, I think the best place to see who is helping others is StackExchange where all the best developers try to help the community.
You can follow Miguel Balparda on Twitter.
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]
