I’ve been working as a a Magento developer for just under 4 years now. Looking back I can think of 47 different sites I have worked on to varying degrees, from styling blog pages to full custom ERP integrations.

I don’t think I would be where I am now, with the knowledge that I have without sites like the Inchoo Blog (Always great explanations), Magento Stack Exchange (Answers with varying degrees of helpfulness) and others. I now feel that I have enough experience and understanding of Magento to create some useful tutorials and how-to guides and would love to give back to the community I learnt so much from. However, I really want to avoid the “copy my code, and you’re done” style tutorials.

When I was first starting out I found these guides could be useful… if you needed to do exactly what they were doing in the guide and nothing else, but as anyone who has ever dealt with Magento will know, it’s not always that simple. You will have business, client or process requirements to fill so all of a sudden that guide you are following isn’t quite as useful as you first thought. As you learn more and more you have the understanding to change these examples for your own needs, but when you’re staring out, or haven’t worked with that particular feature sometimes its not so obvious.

What I’m aiming to do here is to put code up, but also to actually explain what its doing and why we are doing it that way. I’m hoping this gives people the information and knowledge to be able to understand enough to do what it is they need to without being stuck looking for another guide.

I have a bunch of posts that I’m currently drafting covering a number of subjects including:

• MSI (Multi-Source Inventory),
• Certification,
• Using and creating APIs,
• Effective use of di.xml,
• Various issues I come across on a day-to-day basis and solutions.

I currently work for an amazing Magento agency so get to work on some really interesting projects and I’m hoping that will give me more ideas as time goes on. As I was writing this post I was thinking that it would be good to aim for a post a week, having thought about it however, even this post which is just me talking about what I want to write about has taken me a long time just to think about and actually type out in a coherent way. Some of the drafts with code I’ve already spent more than an hour or 2 on and they are not even close to completion. I think I’m going to aim for 1 per month and if I can try for every other week as I get better, but we’ll see how things go. It would also be quite cool do to some videos I think as well but I hate the sound of my own voice so I think I’ll leave that on the back burner for now.

Thanks for taking the time to read. If you want to get in touch or you have any ideas for things you want me to post about then feel free to reach out on the social networks linked up top.