Magento Developer Peter Rusin in an Interview with Cloudways

It’s a tough decision to move from WordPress development to the Magento industry. We have got the chance to interview Mr.Peter Rusin who switched his career from WordPress to Magento development and is very satisfied with his decision. He believes Magento to be more scalable, and a good fit for mid to large companies, along with a strong belief in the Magento community.

Let’s get started with the interview and explore his perspective about Magento in detail.

Lakhani: Hi Peter, it’s lovely to have you with us! Could you please tell our readers about yourself? Walk us through your journey so far.

Peter: Hey Abdur, thanks for an invitation. 

My professional journey started back in 2015 with WordPress. 

Back then I thought that I’m working my PHP-best on complex websites, but well… 

That pretty soon was verified when I moved to another company that was entirely Magento-based.

It’s like, you know, watching youtube videos about martial arts vs becoming a worldwide martial arts champion.

I only realized how a tiny fraction of PHP and it’s possibilities were touched on in my previous position when I saw Magento’s core codebase and it’s corresponding database schemas.

I was spellbound at how complex it was, and I did not understand anything about it.

Lakhani: Previously you have worked as a WordPress developer and now you are pursuing your career in Magento Development. What made you choose Magento as your career path?

Peter: Coincidence. I was looking for a new role that involved PHP, and found a Magento offer on one of the Polish job boards.

I just applied there without much thought and expectations.

And yeah, I knew nothing about Magento, its principles, or anything like that. I only knew it was written in PHP.

Surprisingly, quickly enough they contacted me and we scheduled an interview call.

This process ultimately ended up fruitful, and I got a job there.

Juniorest of the juniors, I jumped ship and moved from the WordPress pond into the gargantuan Magento ocean.

And this turned out to be one of the best decisions I made in my entire career so far.

Lakhani: Since you have worked as WordPress and Magento developer, what difference have you found in these platforms and who should choose Magento as their ecommerce partner?

Peter: There is one big difference between them. 

Scale.

WordPress is way simpler, smaller, and feature-less compared to Magento.

It was initially created just to ease the pain of content management for not-so-techy people, and it’s mainly a blogging platform, but not just that.

They made it fairly easy to extend, and because of that, a lot of cool plugins were created that even make it possible to transfer it into an e-commerce shop (Woocommerce plugin).

The main con is scalability, though.

WordPress was created back in 2003 as a fork of b2/cafelog that got discontinued and since then up to this day it’s using functional programming all over the place.

And functional programming, as opposed to object-oriented programming, is way harder to scale and maintain in the long run.

Don’t get me wrong here. 

This doesn’t necessarily mean that WordPress is bad to begin with.

It is not.

It’s just great either for its purely CMS features like posts, categories, and WYSIWYG (Gutenberg) editor which is top-notch when it comes to writing about basically anything, or it’s good for smaller merchants that are tight on budget, who want something that works and doesn’t cost tens of thousands of dollars to implement.

This leads me to the answer to your question.

So, who should choose Magento as their e-commerce solution?

Mid to large companies that have at least a few hundred thousand dollars of annual sales.

Why?

Because Magento development is very pricey.

There is serious demand in the marketplace for competent people, but they are nowhere to be found.

It takes some years to actually understand what is going on inside this framework, and how to navigate it without wasting hours on clueless errors.

It also takes a lot of patience and resilience to remain on board.

People often quit their positions as Magento developers and just move towards something else that doesn’t necessarily start with M and ends with O.

In my opinion Magento should be chosen as an e-commerce platform carefully.

But once you decide to use it, the possibilities are almost endless.

Because Magento is by far the most complex, and extensible e-commerce platform that is out there.

Lakhani: What do you think about the Magento community? How important is it for the growth of the Magento platform?

Peter: The Magento community cares.

But Adobe is not.

Pretty harsh opinion, right?

Let me explain.

There is arousing frustration amongst the community about the Adobe approach to open source, and their way of handling community contributions which is basically non-existent.

Issues are floating around the official GitHub repository, and hang there tightly, waiting to dry and wither (1.2k+ open issues at the moment)

Adobe also failed to provide a real roadmap for the development and the community got serious concerns about the future of the Magento open source.

This frustration led the biggest brainiacs out of our industry to create Open Letter that developers could sign into. 

This letter just stated that they plan to fork Magento codebase in case Adobe would really decide to abandon open source maintenance.

Over thousand developers across the globe signed this letter, myself included.

So, to answer the second part of your question.

How important is the community in the Magento growth?

At the moment, it is more important than Adobe itself.

Lakhani: It looks like you enjoy helping people learn Magento development. What’s the thought and objective behind it?

Peter: I do, indeed.

Learning Magento is harder than it should be because official documentation is just a scratchpad of concepts with very little examples to look upon.

And when you start to look around for resources to learn from, most often they are just stackoverflow answers or posts published some 5 years ago that are no longer relevant.

It just annoyed me across my whole learning path that there is no centralized space or just a go-to guy who could explain everything to you, and help you along the way.

This surely changed in the last year or so, because people like Mark Shust started to post courses and relevant Magento snippets to help understand the basics.

But still, he is a one man army, and Magento is way too complex to handle all the topics exhaustively just by yourself. 

I see a huge room for improvement in the process of mastering Magento up to the certification-level skillbase.

And also, by guiding people to become top-notch Magento developers faster, the whole ecosystem profits in the long run.

Lakhani: What’s the role of good hosting for a good ecommerce site? What’s your opinion about a managed Magento hosting solution like Cloudways for a Magento site? 

Peter: The most important factor in “good hosting” is communication. If it’s a pain to resolve any issue related to the server, or if the support is non-existent (which is often the case) it’s worth looking for something else. 

My opinion on Cloudways for a Magento site? 

I didn’t host any website there yet, so it’s hard to say anything. 

You are reaching out to coders for an interview which is huge marketing- yay! My experience with Cloudways + Magento is yet to be tested.

We will see.

Lakhani: Who are the top influencers that inspire you?

Peter: Mark Shust, Swift Otter, Yehor Shytikov, Vinai Kopp, and Willem Wigman

Lakhani: What does your work-life balance look like? Are there any activities you enjoy in your spare hours? You can share any pictures of yourself.

I wake up around 5am, hit the gym three days a week, and afterwards, during my so-called “prime time” I focus on personal projects like LinkedIn content creation, business planning, reading, and research. 

I then start my 9-5 work, and relax in the afternoon with my girlfriend.

Two important activities I do daily: reading paperback books and journaling 

Lakhani: Please share your tips and advice with the newbies.

Peter: Let me copy one of my post

“If you want to consistently grow as a developer, start to code something for fun or just out of your 9-5.

Making money from coding is a pretty nice feeling but if the money is the only motivation you will pretty soon start burning out professionally.

So… just think about something that can help you understand what you do at a deeper level.

And learn it after hours.

By stacking up skill sets like that you become more credible.

And credibility builds up authority.”

 

“If you liked this interview, you can find me at LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peter-rusin/

Or learn more about the Magento framework from my website: https://rusin.work/

 

Again, thank you so much for your time. You’re always kind to me 🙂