Meet our website development leads
When planning large-scale projects for your ecommerce business, such as replatforming or migrating your ecommerce website and selecting a suitable platform, choosing the right developers to work with is crucial. Here we give you an exclusive chance to hear from the key Magento development leads at our ecommerce consultancy, as they discuss their experience and their biggest challenges, the benefits of Magento 2 and what makes them tick:
Introduction
Choosing your ecommerce development agency is a difficult decision, especially considering the costs involved with these kind of projects. You need to work with experienced developers, who have an agile and strategic approach. It’s vital to build a transparent and collaborative relationship with your chosen developers, in order to successfully align your company’s ecommerce website with your key business goals and customer needs.
At Space 48, all of our development team are based in-house. Space 48’s digital marketing executive, Jessica Truscott, interviews our technical and programme development leads, who are involved in ecommerce store builds on Magento platforms and strategy development with brands.
The interviews
Here’s our revealing Q&A with the clever people behind the development of award-winning Magento ecommerce websites.
Adam Moss – Programme Lead (Backend)
How long have you worked as a website developer?
10 years in total. Although, I started as a web designer and changed course to become a developer after a couple of years.
What are your biggest challenges as a Magento developer?
The biggest challenge for me is keeping up to date with all the latest tools and development practices. It’s great to have such talented people in this industry capable of reinventing how websites are made, but finding the time to learn all this new information takes a lot of time. Things are becoming more complex, so the learning curve is steeper. I’ve noticed many developers struggle with writing concise documentation of their tools to make learning easier.
What part of the development process do you find most rewarding?
It’s very rewarding when you put something new that you’ve learned into practice for the first time, push your skills and see the results. It’s the same feeling you get when you buy a fancy washer-dryer – the new controls may take some mastering, but you’ll end up with some damn fresh linen!
Which improvement or feature on Magento 2 do you feel has the most impact for ecommerce businesses?
As someone who’s worked for years within SEO, I have wept tears of joy when seeing schema markup added to Magento 2 out-of-the-box. In this ultra-competitive era of ecommerce, you’ve got to have the basic structured data implemented onto your site to improve ranking signals. It’s so important to stand out at least as much as your competition, in order to maintain any sort of positive CTR, and it’s crazy to still see many stores across the web without it.
When you’re not developing websites, what do you like to do to relax?
My hobbies are generally quite active to offset the amount of sitting I do at work, but I find that yoga works wonders for relaxing the body and mind. At home I like to watch a decent film or TV series to unwind. I’d like to say watching Manchester United, but that’s usually the opposite of relaxing!
Dan Davies – Programme Lead (Frontend)
How long have you worked as a website developer?
I started out back in the early days of table layouts and style tags. So, around 18 years now. I hated tables!
What are your biggest challenges as a Magento developer?
Maintaining a clean code base and an optimised website when working with the plethora of third-party modules.
What part of the development process do you find most rewarding?
Seeing the thing that you worked so hard on going live and being used by shoppers.
Which improvement or feature on Magento 2 do you feel has the most impact for ecommerce businesses?
Magento 2 is capable of being around 20% quicker than Magento 1, which is great for helping to increase your conversion rate.
When you’re not developing websites, what do you like to do to relax?
I enjoy learning more about development, so I’m never too far away from my laptop. Beyond that, I like watching sport and films. I rarely sleep!
Andrei Bodeanschi – Technical Lead
How long have you worked as a website developer?
I’ve been tinkering with PHP since 1998, but I’ve been building websites professionally since 2006 (11 years).
What are your biggest challenges as a Magento developer?
With Magento 2 at the moment, a big challenge for me is learning to work effectively with UI components – something I’m sure I’ll overcome by reading some great articles by Alan Storm.
What part of the development process do you find most rewarding?
One of the best parts for me as a Magento developer is when I can optimise an existing piece of code and make it much quicker
Which improvement or feature on Magento 2 do you feel has the most impact for ecommerce businesses?
From a developer’s point of view, I think that code decoupling and the use of unit tests will translate into merchants receiving higher quality code, which means a more maintainable codebase in the long run.
When you’re not developing websites, what do you like to do to relax?
I like spending time with my family, DIY projects round the house, watching TV shows, going to PHP/Magento conferences (including Mage Titans) and reading/watching videos about software craftsmanship.
George Schiopu – Technical Lead
How long have you worked as a website developer?
Building websites since the late ’90s. Hardcore Magento-ing since 2010.
What are your biggest challenges as a Magento developer?
Accommodating last-minute changes in code and making sure the changes are bug-free, performant and secure. Also, dealing with third-party code that can sometimes be sloppy.
What part of the development process do you find most rewarding?
When everything is in “green” in the weekly RAG-report!
Which improvement or feature on Magento 2 do you feel has the most impact for ecommerce businesses?
Dependency Injection (DI), giving developers the ability to write more decoupled code that can be reused more easily.
When you’re not developing websites, what do you like to do to relax?
Family time, stargazing, DIY-ing and building Alexa skills (smart-home stuff) – to name a few.
Magento certification badges:
Wrap up
We hope this exclusive dip into the minds of our key developers has given you a useful glimpse into the technical and strategic challenges facing ecommerce development leads and the characters behind the scenes. Head on over to our people page to find out more about our Technical Director (Tony Brown) and our Head of Development (Iain Hubbard).
Space 48 is a UK-based ecommerce consultancy, specialising in Magento and Magento 2, which has enabled many well-known brands to implement high-performing ecommerce strategies and deliver omnichannel customer experiences. If you want to find out more about how Space 48 could help your business, why not arrange a free consultation with one of our experts?
