Front End Developer coming to Magento!

[alitch]

Hello everyone,

I've been working as a Front End Developer for a few years but just landed a job at a company that is all in on Magento. I am the only technical person here (They have been outsourcing all development) and I have never touched Magento before. They hope to have me doing more than Front End work and want me to be a "Full Stack Magento Developer". This is a bit intimidating and scary. They are currently on Magento 1 and want me to learn Magento 2 for their new projects and to eventually bring their old sites over to Magento 2. Do any of you have any advice on learning paths? Any Magento specific courses or conferences I can use to help me learn and network? I plan to learn more PHP and of course the Zend framework but that's not specific to Magento but it will help. Any advice is appreciated! I'm excited to join this community!

Thanks,

Andrew 

[sherrie]

Hi @alitch, welcome to Magento! How have things been going so far?

You might want to check out our Magento U courses as well as our DevDocs to help get you started.

[Ri0302]

Sorry off topic but I'm actually intending on supporting Magento complete stack and offer my services in SA at negligible/FREE! I hope to add value to the product and therefore to get into the scene I am willing to not charge for services! I own a private IT company and very keen on partnering and basically take control on all South Africa based support and hosting! I have a team of developers as well and extensive Dev experience so that area is covered! If this is possible I would like to discuss further and secure all potential SA clients and future clients as well all round full hosting, Dev and support?

[Rixxo]

Good for you @alitch. A big task ahead.

I've taken on 3 new front end devs in the last 6 months with no Magento experience and they all get their head around it pretty quickly.  I think with Magento 1 the key is to understand the theme structures. Once you get your head around where everything lives, how it goes together and the order in which they are applied, then you are good to go. Right now I would maybe focus on learning 2 over 1 though.

Back endwise, slightly different that may take a little longer. Magento U is worthwhile to get the basic but nothing will beat a bit of hands-on.

Look out for template hints, and see if your company will stretch to buy you some Magento Dev tools. There are some great ones out there that let you know all the things going on in the background that you can't normally see.

[Rixxo]

Hey Andrew,

Update.  

You should speak to this guy in the forum here. Taught himself everything in 6 months. He can probably give you loads of advice.

[alitch]

Hey @Rixxo

Do you have any tools that you would suggest I ask for?

I appreciate the response!

[Rixxo]

My lead dev enjoys telling every new hire about the time I bought him this one https://store.pulsestorm.net/products/commerce-bug-3

Apparently, it makes everything easy and amazing. He's been using it for about 2 years.