About
As a Magento Developer with close to a decade of experience, previously working from Cardiff, South Wales and more recently. Portsmouth, Hampshire. I have worked within just about every subject area of Magento. Ranging from Magento module development, Magento server hosting to Magento performance optimisations. Sometimes I write about interesting topics over at my personal blog
I have worked on a bunch of Magento stores from all across the globe. It started out as a full stack developer within a Magento Agency working on Magento 1 and Magento 2 projects.
Then I slow moved into more of a backend focus, so creating Magento Modules, extending third parties Modules etc. Before realising the complete lack of security attention a lot of module providers have.
It then pivoted to largely reviewing Magento modules we was currently using / looking to install. Then creating patches & reporting the vulnerabilities to the original developers. We found everything from XSS / SQL injections exploits, to complete RCE and file upload exploits. And these was modules from the top few providers!
We also started to experience a lot of site reliability issues as sites grew and larger ones came onboard. Often with everyone pointing fingers at each other and not taking responsibility for issues. This then lead onto pivoting focus once again, onto analysing poor performance on both the infrastructure and application level.
Also during this time, it turned out we was doing more server management than the managed hosing providers. Either due to lack of competence on their part or very slow response times. So we also took the leap into providing internal server hosting for some of our smaller clients, reducing hosting costs to a tenth of what they was originally paying.
Specialities
Magento 2 Hosting
There are lots of choices when it comes to hosting Magento. VPS, Dedicated Server, AWS, Kubernetes. What is the right way? Well there is no right way, no one size fits all solution.
Now for a small retailer or B2B trade store with a steady lower amount of traffic, suggesting a autoscaling AWS solution would likely be a waste of money. A simple lower cost VPS optimised correctly, like 4Cores, 8GB Ram would likely suffice.
But if your a larger business, or see more bursty style traffic (marketing campaigns, sales events etc) even a large dedicated server, 64Cores, 1TB Ram would likely be a bad choice. Instead autoscaling smaller sized nodes would be considered a must here in my opinion.
What about high availability and fault tolerance? You see where I’m going, with off the shelf solutions. You are likely either burning money or not getting the ideal solution you desire.
You need to sit down and produce long term plan on your expectations, traffic throughput, uptime requirements, fault tolerance, compliance / regulatory concerns, costs etc.
Magento 2 DevOps
It still amazes me how far behind software development standards and best practises Magento Agencies and Developers can be. I think this is a unilateral issue pertaining to the PHP community in general. But the amount of implementation I see, where using FTP to sync changes into production then manually running deployment commands is mind boggling!
In 2024, there is no reason to not be using a CI pipeline to deploy changes. Github, Bitbucket, Gitlab all include built-in pipelines. Even something as simple as RSYNC and a BASH script to deploy your changes is better.
As a Magento developer, I put a big focus on automating all the boring admin stuff, so we as developers, can focus on changes with actual meaningful business impact. (Unlike deployments!)
Considering you can achieve Zero Downtime Deployments with reproducible artifacts just by using your VCS provider. There really is no excuses not to be doing it. And while your at it, how about adding some code quality & security static analysis tests?
Magento 2 Performance Optimisations
Magento 2 being slow is a LIE. It may not be the fastest eCommerce framework, but it can definitely be fast. And anyone telling you otherwise is either lacking the experience in developing performant Magento stores, or a sales person likely suggesting Shopify.
Slow Magento page loads are nine out of ten times, going to be either a poorly made Magento Module. Or Varnish has been disabled, likely to get a terrible Magento module to work properly.
The reality of it is, on top of customer frustration at slow page loads. Unoptimised Magento stores cause a reduce amount of traffic throughput, an increases server hosting costs.
As a Magento Developer I specialise in conducting performance testing, both in a local environment where we can isolate lack of performance due to poorly written modules and theme. As well as on production utilising APM tools, where we can also identify misconfiguration of services in the production environment.
With a proven track record of reducing page render times down from an awful 2-10s to 400-800ms.
Work with me
Get in touch with the troubles your experiencing and lets either arrange a call and put a plan together. Or grab a coffee in either Portsmouth, Hampshire or Cardiff.