When the Quick Fix is the Right Fix - Joseph & Jesse

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

Show Notes

Well, it has been quite the year for Magento (Adobe Commerce), PHP and really just developer tools in general! Hyva was introduced, which is going to dramatically change the way Magento websites look and how creatively they can be presented to the world. PHP 8 will soon be integrated with Magento 2.4.3, and Page Builder for Magento ushered in the kind of efficient editability that we’ve been wanting for a very long time! 2021 has truly been a year full of useful upgrades and big changes, and it’s clear that the next chapter in the world of eCommerce web development is going to be a thrilling one. Are you ready for it? 

Right out of the gate, in this episode, Jesse wanted to remind us that we are getting an “at()” method in JavaScript. While it isn’t compatible with Safari for some reason, it’s going to provide a bit of convenience. Of course, Jesse had to credit Wes Bos for bringing this to the community. If you haven’t been following Wes Bos, he is a gift to the developer community and provides excellent free resources on a regular basis. Go to wesbos.com to check him out! Joseph had to sneak in there and mention https://how-i-experience-web-today.com which is a pure, lighthearted example of how frustrating web search is in today’s world of marketing and UI confusion. Don’t forget to click the link and get a quick laugh! 

Furthermore, it’s time for some real “bug talk”. SwiftOtter has been working on a really big project for quite some time with a merchant that has tons of simple products that are highly customizable. RabbitMQ is definitely involved, and with how much information is needing to be drawn from the database regularly, re-indexing recently broke down and a new system just had to be created. The questions around how to create the system got so complicated that Joseph ended up deciding to re-configure the current system with a new Parent ID column to try and solve the issue. Sometimes, it makes sense to completely re-engineer a process and sometimes it’s literally the worst thing you could do, depending on your understanding of what actually is happening. After 4 hours of re-configuring the current system, the issue was pretty much fixed. The solution to our problem is, very often, within reach before we go to extremes.

When you come across issues like this, don’t be afraid to reach out on the SwiftOtter Slack channel for help. As Joseph mentioned in this episode, GitHub is a great resource, but sometimes there is honestly too much information circulating in that network and it’s nice to cut through the noise by going to a smaller group of developers who are all very like-minded. We say it’s a small group, but it’s actually growing rapidly, and as of September 1st, 2021, it’s close to hitting 1300 members. If you haven’t joined yet, we don’t want you to miss out! Go to SwiftOtter.com/Slack to join for free.

(Theme music courtesy of TrendingAudio)