tech services

Rick West

B2B Product Led Marketplace

Rick West, CEO of Field Agent, envisioned a new type of product-led B2B marketplace, one where you could shop for specific services and buy that service all in the same place. We discuss his vision and how he made it a reality. Rick tells us about his experience as a 20-year start-up and the journey he took to make Field Agent a success. He tells us how unique it is in the industry. Your traditional B2B marketplace is going to take you to a connector to have two or three other phone calls, two or three other meetings. Field Agent can take you right to check out. By the time you check out two or three minutes later in near real-time, you’re getting data and results coming back your way.

Field Agent has reimagined B2B retail solutions to help CPG and retail professionals solve common challenges at retail. Our on-demand marketplace contains a full suite of fast, simple, cost-effective tools to help companies evaluate in-store conditions, drive sales, understand shoppers, generate ratings and reviews, and more.

Rick West is an experienced CEO and co-founder of multiple start-ups with an emphasis on technology, innovation, and CPG. As a leader in the Retail Industry for seventeen years in the United States, Hong Kong, and Thailand he has been an Entrepreneur for over sixteen years in the U.S. and currently serves as a speaker and mentor within the business community and research industry. Life Quote: “Don’t live in the world of maybe, let your yes be yes and your no be no”

The Art of Ecommerce Debugging with Joseph Maxwell

This week we interview Joseph Maxwell and discuss his new book, “The Art of Ecommerce Debugging” The video version of the podcast includes an exclusive unboxing of the book. Joseph goes over his motivation for writing this book and how it will help developers be better developers!

Joseph discusses the mindset of resolving problems. We go over TAD (You can listen to know what that means). We talk about work-life balance and how Joseph handles this. We talk about documenting your code. Joseph gives his top 5 things developers should do. (Hint number one is XDebug). The one thing to double your productivity is XDEBUG! Joseph talks about Magento certifications and why this is so important. Why NOT get certified?

Joseph Maxwell: The are of Ecommerce Debugging

https://swiftotter.com/certifications/art-of-debugging#/

This episode was recorded on July 30th, 2021

Hyva themes fast time to market

How Hyva can Reduce Your Time to Market on Magento by 75%

This week we interview Monika Milewska and Antoni Paszkow (who is no stranger to the subject of self-defense).

They are with the Magento development company Magently in Poland. We discuss their recent store launch of https://www.partcatalog.com/ on the Hyva theme. We learned that the time to develop the new theme in Hyva was half that of a new theme in the Blank theme during their Magento1 to Magento2 migration.

Antoni shares his developer experience, and Monika gives us some great performance numbers. They started with a score of 10 on Mobile and ended up with a score of 97!

What is Hyva?

Hyvä comes from the Finnish language and literally means “good”. But also “desirable” and “advisable”. Here’s how it’s pronounced.

We didn’t name our company Hyvä because we think we are that good, it has an intrinsic meaning that’s embedded into our work. We set out to build the best Magento products we possibly can. We want to build products that are really really good. “Said Willem Wigman Founder and creator of Hyvä Themes.”

Our products bring value to merchants, developers, agencies, and ultimately: end-users for your Magento-based website.

How Hyva reduces the time to market

By reducing the amount of Javascript on the site and simplifying the frontend development process, Hyva can reduce your time to market by 4-5 times. This allows developers to use the tools they need on the pages they need them rather than making every page use every tool every time.

This not only increases the performance of the developer, but it also increases the performance of the website dramatically!

Why Magento needs a new theme

The original Magento 2 theme was developed in the early 2010s and has not been updated from a framework/technical standpoint since the launch of Magento 2 in late 2015. In the last 5-6 years the technology and shifted and improved and Magento has not followed. In addition, Adobe Commerce is now focusing all its efforts on the Progressive Web App Studio. This means that the base theme is only getting security updates. The default, out-of-the-box Magento theme is sadly fallen by the wayside and will not be enhanced or upgraded.

Some highlights are as follows:

  • Reduced Complexity. Hyvä Magento 2 themes are powerful and feature-rich but yet simple. Reduced complexity is the number one principle they incorporate.  
  • Enhanced Performance. E-commerce shoppers never forget slow websites. Therefore, fast-working web pages are another goal hidden behind all Hyvä products. To achieve it, these Magento 2 themes incorporate the principle of enhanced performance and increased efficiency. 
  • Improved Developer Experience. A developer-friendly work-environment is also among the benefits of Hyvä Magento 2 themes. 
  • Improved Development Velocity. Reduced complexity multiplied by good work conditions let your coders implement and customize Hyvä Magento 2 themes much faster than other similar solutions. As a result, you reduce average time-to-market metrics and costs.
  • Reduced Dependencies. As we’ve just mentioned above, Hyvä Magento 2 themes contain only two dependencies. Thus, they are way more reliable than most alternative solutions.
  • Reduced Learning Curve. All the principles mentioned above let you reduce the learning curve necessary to master Hyvä Magento 2 themes. It won’t take much time until you become a specialist in the Hyvä Magento 2 themes development

You can learn more about developing on the Hyva theme here at Rock Technolabs.

WordPress and AWS

This week we start a series of interviews on Amazon Web Services and how it has helped merchants and content providers save money and increase performance by using Amazon Web Services.

I am interviewing David Arago and we are featuring these bonus episodes from different brewpubs. This brings out an honest conversation on moving to the cloud and you will hear how cloud services will save time, money and add tons of flexibility! I am using a new ZoomP4 recording device and this was my first time using it. I did not bring a change of batteries. It did not change the quality of the recording, but it did allow us to go out, get batteries and get a second beer.

I am currently looking for subject matter experts in this field to talk about different aspects of AWS. Please go to Talk-Commerce.com/lets-talk and start a conversation! This episode was recorded on August 6th, 2021

Joseph Leedy | Magento Extensions

Welcome to this special tech edition of Talk Commerce, where we explore how merchants, agencies, and developers experience commerce and the communities they work and live in.

This week we interview Joseph Leedy with Wagento Creative. We Discuss Magento extensions and integrations and look at the difference between the two. Joseph helps us understand why merchants need to take some extra time to vet any new extension they install on their website and developers need to be prepared to ask questions on why the extension needs to be installed. We discuss the Magento marketplace and why it is a good place for merchants to look for extensions. Joseph fills us in on what he is working on now and what interesting extensions he worked on in the past. We discuss our Unconference in Orlando Florida in January of 2022 and why Merchants and developers should attend. Joseph Leedy is a Magento developer and certified developer for Wagento Creative, an Adobe Gold Partner. This episode was recorded on July 14th, 2021

Getting started with Amazon Web Services

This is another bonus episode on our series of interviews on Amazon Web Services and how it has helped merchants and content providers save money and increase performance.

I interview David Arago and Jason Camp on getting started on AWS and what technicians and merchants can do to start off on the right foot (or server).

I am currently looking for subject matter experts in this field to talk about different aspects of AWS. Please go to Talk-Commerce.com/lets-talk and start a conversation!

This episode was recorded on August 11th, 2021

Christian Munch | Magerun Headless Magento

Welcome to this tech edition episode of Talk Commerce, where we explore how merchants, agencies, and developers experience commerce and the communities they work and live in. This week we interview Christian Mà¼nch, Head of Development for N98 in Germany. We talk about the history of MageRun, the Swiss Army knife for Magento. We talk about Magento and headless commerce and Christian helps us understand some alternatives to just going headless with a single app.