New Horizons in Magento - Joseph & Jesse

Your host: Joseph Maxwell, Founder and CEO of SwiftOtter & Jesse Maxwell, Tech Lead at SwiftOtter

News

Magento (Adobe Commerce) 2.4.3 releases on 8/10/21! ReCAPTCHA and other exciting updates are coming.

PHP 8 and the “null safe operator”. Lot’s of new features are coming, and some of us might be hesitant to fully embrace these changes.

Discussion

Every single character that we write in code is technical debt. In a perfect world, every single line that we write would be reviewed on a regular basis to ensure that everything we’ve written is “future proof” and in line with the way our software and platforms are changing. The takeaway isn’t to avoid writing code, but to write tighter code that will require the least amount of maintenance in years to come. There are always a variety of ways to accomplish one single goal and great developers differentiate themselves, not by finishing tasks faster, but by taking the extra time to select the best possible option.

SwiftOtter has recently begun focusing on opportunities to “think outside the box” and develop alternative solutions to the most annoying problems that developers face. After a recent, friendly disagreement on LinkedIn, Jisse Reitsma joined Joseph on the podcast to discuss ProductRepository and the best options that developers can utilize to access their database. This episode caught fire because most developers seem to think that their method is the ideal method, while the main takeaway of Jisse and Joseph’s conversation was that none of the available options are satisfactory at this point. Their conclusion was that the Magento community must come together and develop a new solution, from the outside, to remedy this long-standing problem. Instead of waiting for change and hoping it meets expectations, developers have (and always have had) the great right and responsibility to take matters into their own hands and cultivate the future of ecommerce development.

In this episode, Jesse reviewed a recent challenge that got him all tied up in a knot. He was just about to hand something he’d built over to QA when he noticed something troubling. It was on the home page and it was definitely a code issue. After diving deeper, he realized that there was a CSS Selector issue that was inconsistent between production and dev. Fast-forwarding hours into his investigation, he found that a recent 3rd-party module update was the culprit. Jump to 19:50 to hear how he found the problem, resolved it, and prepared to prevent it from happening again! 

Joseph closed this episode down by reminding everyone about the importance of taking notes and preparing for a successful integration test. As Jesse stated, “the human mind can only retain so much information”. Writing notes will help you to store information outside of your mind and defend against a crisis when you get to the review stage. On that note, keep an eye out for helpful content focused around integration testing! SwiftOtter Training exists to help you become a better developer and achieve the life you desire.

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