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Today I start with a new series on my blog: Interviews with members of the Magento community. Who are they, what are they working on and what can we expect from them in the (near) future? Let's start with my first guest and fellow member of the Magento CAB: Vinai Kopp.
Vinai is working as a Freelance programmer and web-developer since 1998 at his own company Netzarbeiter. He specialized on Magento since march 2008 and is mainly active training Magento developers and providing technical consulting. Vinai lives in Heidelberg (Germany) and can be found online on Skype (vinai_kopp) and Twitter (@VinaiKopp). Let's find out what (s)he's like...!
Most of the time I dreamed of becoming an astronaut. Then, as a teenager, I wanted to become a hippie, living of the stuff I created. I'm glad I took a different path, though :).
Attitude determines emotional response and the created results. I am responsible for my attitude towards people and events.
There are two types of days, in the home office and during trainings. My office day:
During a training:
...having a funny and exciting time with a friend in a sweet location.
...getting along with people, reading code, enjoying my life.
...listening to people whine, doing things I don't really feel like doing (booooring!).
My daughters! And that customers like my trainings a lot!
After some years with osCommerce (and derivatives) and becoming sick of it. I sold a Magento-shop to a customer. After he said yes I didn't have a chance to back out of the contract and had to wrap my head around all the new things in the Magento core. Thank god I love learning new skills, otherwise I wouldn't have went through with it.
Everybody: it's only worth it if you plan on doing several Magento projects or plan to create your own store and continue it for a long time. Developers: there always are better ways to do things in Magento. Project Managers: you will spend learning time in the first three Magento Projects.
EAV. I believe this is the main reason why scaling Magento is so painful after a certain size.
The German localization module, or the Market Ready German extension.
Speed. Add the possibility to monitor new threads in the extension section of the forums (I often miss new posts regarding my extensions).
My plans are to further empower more and more developers to have fun creating awesome shops with Magento.Also, I'll try to get my feedback into the planning of Magento 2.0 - I hope Magento Inc. will open up some kind of communication channel for that, soon, like they announced.The issues I would like to discuss mostly involve increasing Magento scalability.
..it inspires and empowers people! Thanks Vinai for your cooperation! Next week I'll interview Artyom Rabzonov from Aheadworks. If you want to stay up-to-date, you can subscribe to my RSS feed, the Newsletter or my Facebook page.
Recently I've seen some (often absolute) statements going around, generally in the line of "open source commerce platforms are a terrible idea". Now of course different solutions always have different pros and cons.
A hierarchy of evidence (or levels of evidence) is a heuristic used to rank the relative strength of results obtained from scientific research. I've created a version of this chart/pyramid applied to CRO which you can see below. It contains the options we have as optimizers and tools and methods we often use to gather data.
