Brent Peterson and Jisse Reitsma discuss all things frontend, including PWA Studio, Vue Storefront, and the new Hyvä theme for Magento 2! We hope you enjoy Talk Commerce EPISODE 1!
Notable quotes from this podcast
The front-end world moved on with a focus upon modern-day practices to improve the lighthouse score, to improve the mobile experience and nothing changed within Magento. @jissereitsma
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Today on the podcast, my guest is Jisse Reitsma. Jisse is the founder of Yireo.com, an extension developer, a developer trainer, and 3x Magento Master. His passion is for technology and open source. And he loves talking as well.
Jisse joins me to talk about all things about Magento; PWA Studio, Vue Storefront, and Hyva
The shifting to Hyva Theme and what that means for agencies and Magento developers, The era of multiple frontends, How to build a better Magento community, Advice for hiring a Magento Developer, and much more.
You’ll learn:
(0.55) My concerns as an agent/leader on Magento moving from using the Vue Storefront theme to Hyva.
(2.21) Jisse’s thoughts on the reasons for moving and also talks about the counter side of this.
(8.22) Negative effects of Hyva hype on PWA Studio and why Jiss thinks this is not Justifiable.
(10.20) Jisse’s blog posts that have the technical details for Hyva Developers: https://www.yireo.com/blog/2021-02-21-magento-pwa-studio-vue-storefront-hyva-all-suck
(11.12) Why in five years’ time there’s going to be multiple frontends and the impact of this on the developers and agencies.
(13.30) How to deal with the negative impacts of having multiple frontends and the hesitation I have on Vue Storefront.
(14.26) Challenges that come with Hyva.
(17.11) Why Hyva is a winning game for a lot of agencies, but not all.
(18.12) Why the Magento community needs to be critical about the good and the bad part of Magento. .
(29.29) Challenges that the developers and agencies are bound to face while using Magento and also what the clients look for in Saas Solutions. We talk about some of the tangible solutions for these challenges
(36.03) Advice for hiring a developer and the mistake to avoid that I made while hiring.
(38.10) Jisse’s thoughts on why there are fewer PWA Studio buys.
Ideas/Quotes
- The interesting part is that they set out to replace the current frontend that we basically got to hate; all of the knockout requirements and too much JavaScript, too much complexity and more importantly it’s also really hard to optimize.
- The front-end world moved on with a focus upon modern-day practices to improve the lighthouse score, to improve the mobile experience and nothing changed within Magento.
- If you dive into Deity, you really need to get and understand the whole architecture of a React App, communicating with some kind of node middleware layer where Magento is just part of ultra microservices in that backend.
- I got started with React about three and a half years ago. I started doing side projects and only a half year later I began to say that I was maybe good at React.
- Before doing that first project, you first need to become a Vue developer or a React developer.
- It’s logical that as soon as they become negative about something and they are willing to be honest, and open about their own personal opinion, they’re going to share that opinion.
- Now that Hyva is on the rise, suddenly a lot of agencies simply decide “now PWA studio is shit”. Basically, all of those other alternative front-ends are not good enough.
- I can see why if you’re a React developer trying to do Hyva, it might be confusing because you have to know all the different functions that a typical Magento team would know.
- So instead of talking about one front-ends, the reality is going to be in the upcoming five years that there’s going to be multiple frontends.
- We met with a client for who we did some training for and their site was loading in eight seconds! And somehow they found that acceptable and then I started doing some analysis. And your typical Magento site loads in four seconds, which is still not acceptable!
- I feel like at some point the Magento community started to accept some of these things as “we’re not going to go much faster”.
- Five years of stagnation has led us to having the regular theme load in four or five seconds or whatever that is. I think the Hyva Theme was exciting for me is that they’re showing less than one second load times, which I think that’s super exciting .
- I learned something about composer, for instance, and I went back to Magento then I thought, am I not understanding it properly? Or is Magento doing it differently than I would do that? And slowly while diving into all of that technology I learned that Magento developers are people too, and people make mistakes.
- People within Magento make architectural decisions and some of them are awesome. But some of them are maybe less wise.
- The whole purpose of open source is just to collaborate and work together to improve it and be critical as well.
- The inner core of Magento is just so full of opportunities still. There are so many good things in architecture as well. However, we need to be critical about what are the good parts and what are the bad parts.
- They don’t want Magento to be the perfect CMS. Because it’s not about building a CMS. It’s about e-commerce. They don’t want the inventory system to replace all of those ERP systems out there. They simply want to have a flexible system that could be implemented in numerous sites.
- The real goal is just to make sure that they do e-commerce as well as they can while relying upon the community to keep them sharp and to direct them in the direction that is needed.
- As it gets more complex, fewer people are going to be interested in it.
- Each of the agencies is going to make their choice and it will be some kind of a hybrid between using a wired-in theme, like Hyva, or using Vue storefront or PWA studio.
- The difficulty is always like technology is maybe open source and it’s all available without the price, but there’s actually a huge price in there and that’s the customization bit.
- I think that most of the clients out there looking for a project don’t know about the technology at all. So instead of actually selling the technology— “Hyva people are saying that you can’t build a fast shop with Vue Storefront, or I don’t believe when the people of Vue Storefront are saying the same thing about the alternatives. All of those technologies nowadays are leading into faster front ends anyway.
- Technology and the agency are Tightly connected. And that’s where current diversity comes from in the current community as well. Different people, different needs.
- The client is going to care about the amount of time it takes to build it, the speed of the site when it’s done, how much it costs to maintain over time, and then finally, what are the features that are there without having to do anything? And then what features can I make at some reasonable price?
- I think that there’s so much change and that therefore a lot of people in the ecosystem of Magento are confused.
- The more difficult thing is for each developer, for each agency, but also for each client, is to make the right choice in the right way. The bottom line is that it’s not going to be easy, but definitely, it’s going to be offering more opportunities than before.
- Get a React developer to do React. Don’t try to just instantly convert a Magento front-end developer to React.
- So sometimes I’m getting an email from people promoting their services because they’re good at everything. So they are specialists in all things. But actually a specialist at nothing.
What Was Mentioned
vuestorefront https://www.vuestorefront.io/
Hyva themes : https://hyva.io/
Vinai on Twitter: https://twitter.com/vinaikopp?lang=en
Magento Community: https://magento.com/
Yireo on Twitter: https://twitter.com/yireo
Jisse on Twitter : https://twitter.com/jissereitsma
Willem on Twitter: https://twitter.com/willemwigman?lang=en
Full Transcript
Jisse: [00:00:00] What do you know about “Hyva” already?
Brent: [00:00:07] I only really know what I saw at the launch party. One of the things that really interested me out of the launch party was some of the topics around “why did they change”?
They started with Vue Storefront and they found it very complicated. Then they said, “Oh, let’s use Willem’s theme.” Suddenly within a week or two, they had a working website.
I’m interested in this because I feel like in the last [years] since Magento 2 came out, it feels heavier and it’s bloated and it’s harder and people are complaining and so this seems very fresh and exciting. That is the number one thing I had a really good conversation with the Vinai and he was excited about it
Jisse: [00:01:16] I liked the part that Vinai mentioned somewhere on Twitter or maybe repeated as well that this was the first time he got excited about something in Magento. So, that’s proving a point as well yeah so, to me I find it interesting that indeed Integer_Net, the creators behind Hyva, first tried out VueStorefronts and I believe before that, they tried Deity as well. (Another PWA provider as I call them because they basically just supply you with part of the stack.) On top of it, you can build your own PWA.
But for me, the interesting part is that they set out to replace the current frontend that we basically got to hate all of the knockout requirements and too much JavaScript. Too much complexity and more importantly it’s also really hard to optimize.
The front-end world moved on with a focus upon modern-day practices to improve the lighthouse score, to improve the mobile experience and nothing changed within Magento.
When they [Integer_net] started with Deity, I think they were promised [their solution] will be the perfect option to do something better with the front-end. There was one caveat, they used to be based upon React is using also a really React-based stack with Apollo clients, or at least in the past, I believe that was part of the story and their architecture was basically nothing like Magento.
And because of that, if you dive into Deity, you really need to get and understand the whole architecture of a React app, communicating with some kind of node middleware layer where Magento is just part of ultra microservices in that backend. Back then a lot of people were promised that it would be awesome and also easy. And maybe it’s still awesome, but it’s definitely not easy.
So then they [Integer_net], started with VueStoreFront and they got led into that same promise, but to my personal feeling as in it’s, like the same architecture and it’s offering a middleware layer where Magento is one of those backend services that you would connect to. Now not based upon a React, but based on a Vue. So to make it successful, you really need to be a good Vue developer.
I got started with React about three and a half years ago. I started doing side projects and only a half year later I began to say that I was maybe good at React.
And that’s the difficulty for a lot of Magento agencies. If they are being lured and promised an easy kickstart with some kind of PWA technology. They think “but then we’re going to do the first projects” then we’re going to make a couple of mistakes. With the second project, “it’s going to run better.” With the third project, “it’s going to be more successful”. But before doing that first project, you first need to become a Vue developer or a React developer. That’s where Willem stood up and he said we could become React developers. We could become Vue developers but why?
We could also just recreate the front end in a better way based on that same Magento stack that showed the XML layout and the PHtml templates. The technology that is loaded into the browser, CSS and JavaScript, that’s just got completely wiped out and rebuilt for something better which is where the performance comes from. But because of that, it’s a tiny little layer that the front-end development team needs to know about. I call it that tiny, but switching to TailwindCSS and Alpine is learning a total new way of dealing with things so that there is a learning curve. Definitely, there’s the kickstart of becoming first a junior [developer], then slowly you become a senior [developer]. In general, that promise made more sense to a lot of developers.
So that’s the long story short. A little of how I see it, how they got started with Hyva in the first place, and where they see the benefits of it. However, I think there’s also a counter side as well. The release party of Hyva was nice to see so many different friends from the Magento community get excited about something within the scope of Magento. I think that’s showing something and it’s well worth Hyva already. However, I also caught that negative sense that people were not too happy with Vue storefronts.
Brent: I got the sense that there was unhappiness and it’s really directed from Willem and some of [Integer_Nets] experiences around those people that worked with it.
Jisse: Yes, it’s logical as soon as they become negative about something and they are willing, to be honest, and open about their own personal opinion, they’re going to share that opinion. However, now that Hyva is on the rise, suddenly a lot of agencies simply decide “now PWA studio is shit”. Basically, all of those other alternative front-ends are not good enough. But I still remember the days where I have given PWA studio training to an experienced team of react developers. They understood everything I told them about PWA Studio. It was not hard for them. It was natural the way the architecture was built, hooks were being implemented, the stuff they needed to do themselves because it was not done for them. I started to talk about theme inheritance and they started to laugh “Hey, but we don’t want to have theme-ing. That’s what we do anyway, with a react application”, they build their own stuff.
Brent: I think we should split this into three areas. One would be the technical side. (But we don’t want to go too technical) The next one would be the agency side and how an agency approaches [Frontend development]. The third area would be what the client is interested in. I’m not super interested in talking in depth about the technical bits of this and I think —
Jisse: oooh, so disappointing.
Brent: I’ll post a link to your blog in our show notes when we publish this video. Your blog posts go through a lot of it, in-depth. It gives a good summary of what we should expect as a developer from a technical side. And for me, it was a good perspective on what a developer should be looking at.
Then as you jump to the agency side, you think “Oh, okay. Yeah, that does make a lot of sense”. I can see why if you’re a React developer trying to do Hyva, it might be confusing because you have to know all the different functions that a typical Magento team would know. I thought [your blog article] was very interesting.
Jisse: That’s basically, maybe also the thing for developers. I think actually a lot of the developers out there are listened to. That is mouthy. They actually are mouthy multiple ways. So first of all you hear them speak out loud about certain things, but they also easily share their own personal opinion. Which makes it always harder for maybe other developers to point out like, Okay, but I disagree or I agree with a certain vision there. And I think with the Magento ecosystem, it’s now a fact that actually Adobe is going to go for the PWA studio route. It’s also a fact that a lot of Magento developers love Hyva as well. And it’s also a fact for me that actually there’s a lot of agencies that don’t want to go the Adobe way, but don’t want to go the Hyva way, but they want to go their own way with the front-ending. So instead of talking about one front-ends, the reality is going to be in the upcoming five years that there’s going to be multiple frontends. For me that’s challenging already because as soon as I would receive somebody who’s interested in front-end developer training, my next question would be “but which one?” Which frontend do you want to use? And if there’s zero knowledge then it’s also more difficult to find out what kind of technology would fit that person best. And that would be on a per developer basis. But then if we are looking at it from an agency point of view, then to my personal understanding it’s either the commercial parts that you need to deal with or still the developer part, but then it’s not one single developer, but it’s just a bunch of developers. So how to make sure that you’re adopting that specific technology that is actually the best for your development team.
If they are going to hate it, you’re not going to be productive if they are going to love it, but they’re not going to be really productive about it. It’s not going to work either way. Somehow you need to find out all of that beforehand, then that’s the challenging thing I think, for the upcoming nine years.
Brent: Yeah. And I think too what is your goal as an agency is your goal. And as an agency to have something like Vuestorefront that you could also bolt on to BigCommerce. I think that if you have a mixture of business and there is a solution that Vue is the answer for, and you have a team of Vue developers, and you can be developing storefronts on BigCommerce or Magento that makes a lot of sense to centralize in that solution. The only hesitation I have on Vuestorefront is that you’re putting it on them. Like it’s not, a sort of independent thing.
Even Hyva. I would like to talk about some of the commercial bits of it. I feel like Hyva should be an open-source, it would be a much more successful project if it was open source. But then how do they make money on that part of it?
Jisse: The money is one part, but it’s also basically how they find the time to make sure that it’s moved from this early stage where a lot of features are working but it’s not yet complete. As in the old front-ends which makes a couple of people say but then Hyva is not stable enough. But there’s also basically the calculation that you need to make, if Magento it’s a traditional front end, there’s a hundred percent feature complete. However, with every customization, it’s going to cost you twice while with Hyva it’s going to cost you half. But it does not feature complete yet. It’s just depending upon what kind of project you’re running, which one is going to be more profitable. And I think the aim for Hyva is just to take over that’s what they dream of, but you can’t do that unless you have some financial guarantee. So that’s actually still what’s happening internally. But yeah back to your point about Vue Storefront. The lock-in is something actually that makes me laugh a little bit because what is the current lock-in with Magento to the traditional front ends? While there’s a lock-in with an open-source project called knockouts. There’s the Lockin with an open-source project Require, and there are so many different projects involved with Magento because Magento is not just all of the codes written by Magento, but it’s the combination of hundreds of open source projects. And the challenge is actually not that much who owns that code because, with Vue storefronts, it’s open source. So that’s not really the difficulty. The more challenging question would be how well-maintained that code. And then, I have to honestly say that Vuestorefront is actually so eager to, to still fulfill their own goals, to make sure that their own community is happy. So they’re really active. While I honestly don’t know about the activity of the knockouts project.
Brent: I guess I’m not familiar with the knockout one.
Jisse: So that’s actually part of the traditional front end. The knockout JavaScript. But yeah so, basically there are so many different open source projects already making up Magento. And often we don’t realize it. And it’s just, now that we make somebody else responsible for maintaining that frontend while Magento has not been really maintaining it for five years anyway.
So, as I see it, we’ve been in a lock-in already. We’ve been a Corona lockdown but then a Magento lockdown for the last five years and it’s not that Magento was forcing it upon us. But it was simply us not being clever enough. To break out of it. And at least Diety and VueStorefront paved the way and now Hyva is just doing it in a different style. That seems to be like a winning game for a lot of agencies, but not everyone. And that’s just proving that the lockdown is over
Brent: I think the reality is a couple of years ago or whenever Deryck (Harlick) and I went on a business trip to Belgium with Adobe and we met with a client for who we did some training for and their site was loading in eight seconds!
And somehow they found that acceptable and then I started doing some analysis. And your typical Magento site loads in four seconds, which is still not acceptable!
Jisse: I find it hard to compare things. Slow loading time definitely is bad.
Brent: And the point is that I feel like at some point the Magento community started to accept some of these things as “we’re not going to go much faster because…” I don’t know what the “because” is, it doesn’t matter. We’re just this big, huge company, and, I’m not going to name any names, is working for this big agency and their load time is eight seconds. Can we improve on that? Yes, of course, we can improve on it! PWA studio comes out and your load time is one second or two seconds out of the box or something. Why shouldn’t Magento? Why? As I feel, I think you’re right. Five years of stagnation has led us to having the regular theme load in four or five seconds or whatever that is. I think the Hyva Theme was exciting for me is that they’re showing less than one second load times, which I think that’s super exciting .
Jisse: Well that’s still the technical part right. But I personally also see that there’s a kind of philosophy goal. Basically, if you study what’s going on with the Magento community, it’s interesting that we’ve been in that situation for five years, and then only after five years, some smart Dutch guy stands up and says “I’m going to do it differently”. And to me, it’s, showing also that still, too many people refer to Magento as being the total solution provider for everything.
While the reality is that once I started to dive into Magento 2. I started to read myself into all of that related to technology. But once I learned something about composer, for instance, and I went back to Magento then I thought, am I not understanding it properly? Or is Magento doing it differently than I would do that? And slowly while diving into all of that technology I learned that Magento developers are people too, and people make mistakes. However, because they are Magento developers, suddenly they need to come up with the most ideal and most perfect solution. While the reality is that we’ve learned already for the last five years that’s not the case. People within Magento make architectural decisions and some of them are awesome. But some of them are maybe less wise. And then we bluntly just copy all of that and say okay, but because it’s Magento, then it’s true. While the whole purpose of open source is just to collaborate and work together to improve it and be critical as well.
Brent: I agree with that. The critical part is something that we’ve been lulled into a sense of complacency on what we have. And the reality of that is that people are flocking to Shopify and some of these other SaaS-based platforms.
Jisse: Yeah the reality is as well that the inner core of Magento is just so full of opportunities still. There are so many good things in architecture as well. However, we need to be critical about what are the good parts and what are the bad parts. And a funny thing is actually, I’ve been talking about this with Magento people as well and they all confirm the same picture. They don’t want Magento to be the perfect CMS. Because it’s not about building a CMS. It’s about e-commerce. They don’t want the inventory system to replace all of those ERP systems out there. Now that they simply want to have a flexible system that could be implemented in numerous sites, but there’s still a reason why people or larger e-commerce clients have ERP systems as well. They’re not looking to replace all of that. Even though sometimes you get that impression by looking at the roadmap. But the real goal is just to make sure that they do e-commerce as well as they can while relying upon the community to keep them sharp and to direct them in the direction that is needed. Then back through the front-end bits, I find it almost funny that only five years later after that initial release of Magento 2.0 after so many people left Magento or were looking at PWA solutions or some people were negative about Magento altogether. That they came up with an alternative themselves. So what happened in between? That’s the thing I find funny to conclude. Sometimes it’s not inventive enough to come up with a clean solution or, maybe it is because currently we have Hyva and we have a wonderful community coming up with exciting things. But yeah, so that, that’s like the anthropological approach of how I see things as well.
Brent: I’ll speak from the agency side because as an agency person, I’m dealing with both sides. I’m dealing with what the client wants and the costs of what we can deliver to the client. And then from the sales side you’re dealing with, it costs this, and because there’s some complexity, you have to say no to the client, which no salesperson wants to do that from the developer’s side, you have all these mixed messages and complexity and different technologies that the developers should learn to be able to execute on something. So, as an agency, you’re getting pulled in all sorts of different ways. One of the easiest things about Magento, when it first came out, is it was just a monolith and you just did it this way. And there were a lot of choices, right? There are even more choices, which are good and bad. I think one thing Vinai has said too as it gets more complex, fewer people are going to be interested in it.
Jisse: Yeah and that’s maybe referring to the Magento core architecture. So things like MSI are both awesome, but also really difficult and I actually read a Slack thread this morning where a lot of people were just also discussing that maybe one of the good things about Magento currently is that you could remove MSI as well using “hacky” things which are maybe a go through for you. Also, I do see people get enthusiastic about MSI as well and, basically, the reason to have this little call together was to discuss the front end and the interesting thing again, for me as well is that with that front-end some people love Hyva and some other people are critical. Just like with React and just like with everything else.
Magento is no longer that monolith. So that’s, like, the reality. That everyone needs to realize, not only developers but also agencies and also the clients. And it doesn’t mean that the era of Magento is all over. It just simply means that we need to make certain choices more carefully.
And the difficulty there is for a developer. It should boil down to what kind of technology are you good at? So if you are bad at creating React code, but you understand Hyva [and the Magento traditional frontend] then go that way. But if you’ve played around with react already, and basically you want to get rid of that XML layout of the traditional front ends, then react is the way to go.
So I, personally, think that developers should follow their guts or their hearts. It’s more of a personal choice. For an agency, it’s a more difficult choice because you already have those developers and what you need to find out is which direction all of those developers are leaning into. Are they leading towards Vue or React, or Hyva? What is getting them excited? Because if you’re trying to push it in an opposite direction of what they actually want, it’s not going to work out.
But if they’re going to choose a direction that they find also in but they’re not good at it Then it’s also not going to work out because then you’re wasting the client’s time and money. And that’s, I think, like the most difficult part, all of those choices need to boil down to economics. Money needs to be made. And that’s also the most frustrating part for the clients. If you go to one agency in the near future that agency will say, “Oh, but we use Hyva. And the performance is guaranteed”. And then you go to another agency and they say “We’re using PWA studio and the lighthouse score, there is much better than Hyva”
And then you go to the third one and they say “Well Vuestorefront is more independent”. So you don’t have it with Magento. And what should you choose? I don’t know. I honestly don’t know.
Brent: Each of the agencies is going to make their choice and it will be some kind of a hybrid between using a wired-in theme, like Hyva, or using Vue storefront or PWA studio. They’re, going to make a decision internally on which way to go, or they might have a big enough organization where they have Vue developers and they have some React developers.
But I think from the client side the hard part is figuring out the cost and the long-term maintenance and then comparing that to some other SaaS platform. If you look at Magento, in the sense of just, “Hey, I’m going to turn it on”, just like you turn on a SaaS type of thing, it’s no more complicated or less complicated than it would be just turning on Shopify. The hard part is that you can do whatever you want to it. And as soon as you tell somebody, “yeah, of course, you can do that, but it’s going to cost this much money”. They’re like, “what? No, I want to do it though. And I don’t want it to cost any money.”
Jisse: So the difficulty is always like technology is maybe open source and it’s all available without the price, but there’s actually a huge price in there and that’s the customization bit. But I think that most of the clients out there looking for a project don’t know about the technology at all.
So instead of actually selling the technology, Hyva people are saying that you can’t build a fast shop with Vue Storefront, or I don’t believe when the people of Vue Storefront are saying the same thing about the alternatives. All of those technologies nowadays are leading into faster front ends anyway.
It’s just that the technology and the agency are Tightly connected. And that’s where current diversity comes from in the current community as well. Different people, different needs.
Brent: The reality of it is that the client is going to care about the amount of time it takes to build it, the speed of the site when it’s done, how much it costs to maintain over time, and then finally, what are the features that are there without having to do anything? And then what features can I make at some reasonable price? Those are really good indicators of what, as a salesperson, I’m going to tell the client. It is up to the agency to spell out that Magento is going to cost this much to maintain the less you do to it, the cheaper it is going to be to run it. If you just get Magento out of the box [it’ll be cheaper]. If you attach something like PWA studio or Vuestorefront you’re essentially headless, and once Magento changes, if you don’t add a bunch of modules, you are almost like a SaaS platform. You could run Magento on the back without ever having to touch it, just do the standard upgrades and run your front end the way you’d like to run.
Jisse: That’s still an option for headless. There are agencies out there that want to specialize in Magento, but others are just, open-minded more than that, they also want to take in other competitors of Magento. But I think that there’s so much change and that therefore a lot of people in the ecosystem of Magento are confused. Like, where should we go next? And what’s going to happen? But I was just reminding myself that in the past, we had the same points where Magento 2 was introduced and we needed to migrate to Magento 2. But then with a stack that is much more complex with a front end is still dead, slow, and outdated and there are so many things wrong with it. We still managed to do all of those different projects. We still managed to sell all of it to the clients as well. So apparently we could still do that with the new upcoming front-ends as well.
Brent: We launched a project when Magento 2.0 came out. It was November of 2015 when it was started and we had a project live by January. I won’t say who it was but it was very difficult. We definitely looked at Magento 2 as being bigger, better, faster, more features. And there certainly were more features but it certainly was bigger, and faster was still coming.
Jisse: Overall I, and we think that the challenge of the upcoming time is not going to be how good the certain technology is or which PWA is going to win the battle. I think they’re all going to win. The more difficult thing is for each developer for each agency, but also for each client. Is to make the right choice in the right way. The bottom line is that it’s not going to be easy, but definitely, it’s going to be offering more opportunities than before because basically all of that wonderful technology is now at our disposal, which is true.
Brent. Regardless of whether Hyva is better than Vuestorefront or PWA studio, it has sparked some excitement in the community and we’re talking about it now. I would suspect that we’re going to see more people talking about it. Your blog post summarized it very well by saying “Get a React developer to do React”. Don’t try to just instantly convert a Magento front-end developer to React. I’ve made that exact mistake. We’ve just put people on those projects saying “it’s just JavaScript, just do it”. It’s not actually listening to them.
Those types of things from a technical side are a great place to start and a great place to do it. The challenge is making sure that if you’re going to have some developers that are specifically doing something, then it’s harder to get them to, at some point, be redundant.
Jisse: Yeah, exactly. And that’s, I think one of the points too is that the technology stack is just growing and it’s not just Magento or React or Vue, but it’s also an elastic search. It’s also all of those other microservices that are currently being adopted by Magento. Put together, you can’t be a real good full stack developer because the stack is too full. So that’s, the stack is far too large to have that knowledge and to be good at everything. So sometimes I’m getting an email from people promoting their services because they’re good at everything.
So they are specialists in all things. But actually a specialist at nothing.
Brent: It does lend to the whole idea of how do you get somebody into Magento so they feel comfortable? From a technology side and talking to a client, you can’t make it overly complicated. Some of the ways people are approaching this are wrong right now to get people into Magento. Sometimes you’re explaining too much. There has to be a different approach and there has to be a different approach, even from the Vuestorefront and PWA sides. There has to be an approach of having some buy-in from Adobe from an agency side, I don’t see a lot of PWA stuff happening yet. I know that there’s JH and there are some agencies that are doing PWA studio. But honestly, I don’t see it. I don’t see hundreds of stores going out there getting launched every day when that’s what should be happening.
Jisse: The question I still have is: Is it still not happening because people don’t get PWA or is it still not happening because nobody was actually waiting for PWA they were waiting for something like Hyva. But likewise, a lot of people were on Magento 1 waiting for Magento 2 to improve in a certain way and then it didn’t happen. Because they were simply waiting for the wrong Magento 2 version. So Magento 2 is a different approach, a different technology, different strategy for dealing with things. And that’s something we need to accept. So for PWA, I personally believe that PWA studio and Vuestorefronts are more than ready. It’s just a question of are you expecting full features of everything that was there in the past with Magento making Magento so complex or are you just waiting for those core features that are well-supported just to have an easier platform to build your own features in an easier way. Lowering the barrier of new functionality. So it’s just a question. What are we waiting for? And I, at least I see also the benefit of Hyva which is that we’ve got this alternative, which resembles Magento so much. But now done properly in a modern-day web environments with Tailwind CSS and Alpine JS. So that at least the performance is good already out of the box. But it doesn’t mean that PWA is not going to happen. It’s just that PWA is not going to happen for everyone.
Brent: It was great talking today. I did have a couple of questions from our team. They wanted to ask you one question from Madeleine Anderson was when are you moving to Minnesota?
Jisse: Currently we have a situation with a pandemic happening all over the world. So I think that maybe we postpone this question for next year
Brent: And just my comment is we had two weeks of minus 20 Celsius straight without ever going above minus 10 Celsius. And it seems like a great place to live in January.
Jisse: But still you, think, I think you are still electricity, right?
Brent: Yes we are very accustomed to very hot and very cold. We had another question from our Latin team and they want to know if you like tacos.
Jisse: I do.
Brent: Good. We’ve covered all the important points in our webinar today and I’m super excited. Anything that you wanted to say about Yereo?
Jisse: No, not really except maybe if people are interested in reading that blog. So I’m personally seeing myself as a happy developer guiding people in the relevant technology and personally, I’m just happy to dive into Hyva, but I’m also happy to dive into a PWA studio and Vuestorefront. So come talk to me if you also want to debate more or all about this because the more discussions we have about this the more healthy the Magento community will get.
Brent: I can’t agree with you more about that. I think that regarding some reinvigoration into the community. This is a great time to start. Soon we’ll be able to travel and soon we’ll be able to have our in-person conferences and hopefully Mage UnConf will happen this year. I don’t know if it’s going to,
Jisse: Mage UnConf Minnesota?
Brent: No, is it already canceled for Germany? It’s usually in September, October, or November?
Jisse: I don’t know whether something is going to happen there or not but I can maybe also still promote that Reacticon is going to happen for the fourth time and it’s definitely not going to be in person though. It’s going to be online. Just like the previous time, free attendance to anyone. And it’s going to be focused on all of this front-end stuff and more. Like the proper pronunciation of Hyva
Brent: My react to that is that I’m viewing that at a new angle now, and I’m excited for Reacticon
Jisse: Mic drop. Perfect ending
Brent: All right. Jisse Thank you.
Jisse:. Yes. Thanks for having me.
Brent: We’ll do this again. We have so many more topics now that I’ve thought about as we’re talking here and again, I’ll post the link to your blog posts in the show notes and we’ll link it directly to there. I feel like everybody should read it. And it was a great summary of those three technologies
Jisse: Awesome. Thanks. Yeah. All right. Bye. Thanks for having me.
Wow, you read the entire transcript. Not sure if anyone has done that. Some of the keywords that a service is asking for is speed vue banner stand. Why it wants banner stand or retractable banners is beyond me. Serriously something wrong there. More likely that vue file and the import vue function for the js file is way more important.
