Looking for some PHP/Magento contract work

I am looking for some contract work for PHP and/or Magento. Magento 1 is where my primary focus lies, though I have done work on Magento 2 as well.

In terms of the type of contract I am looking for, my preference is to find 2-3 Magento and/or PHP implementations that need between 5 and 15 hours of senior level PHP consulting and/or development per week. I’m happy to augment or consult either for a merchant, directly, or via an agency.

(Jump to professional competencies)

Introduction

My focus has been, for the most part, Magento 1 and the ecosystem around it. My perspective is that there are still a good number of merchants out there who have built their online existence around Magento 1 and have not yet found a sufficient compulsion to upgrade to Magento 2, to rebuild their existing work (which, truth be told, has probably cost a lot to build), or move to an up to date platform.

So while most agencies have chosen to move their practice to Magento 2 (for good reason, I might add) I have chosen to remain focused on Magento 1 for as long as there is a viable market to do so within.

Work With Me!

Why would you choose to work with me? I have 20 years of experience in web-based software development. That has given me some good technical chops, but I also understand the business of web development. I have seen loads of money wasted on new projects that did not truly satisfy a business need or provide the expected benefit. There may be many younger, cheaper, developers who can work with the latest tools, but my perspective is that if you work on the bleeding edge, expect some blood. “New and shiny” is not as important as “what is beneficial”. Sometimes “new and shiny” fits the bill, but often it does not.

That makes me more of a consultant than a programmer and so I would call myself either a programming consultant or a consulting programmer. I have worked in this capacity for 15 of my 20 years in software development.

Experience

Of those 15-20 years I have spent just shy of 10 years working for both Zend Services and the Magento Expert Consulting Group. In both groups I worked as a software consultant, trainer, course developer, sales engineer, and evangelist. My more significant contributions has been in PHP and Magento performance, with additional contributions in architecture, security, and design.

The rest of those five years have been spent working as an independent software consultant in the same vein; Magento and PHP. My greatest public contribution has been a Magento focused Selenium testing framework called “Magium“. I have not actively developed it since 2018 but I still use it for anything that requires some kind of browser interface; for example, if I need to pull a table from a website and ingest it into a database and curl doesn’t work (for example, if a table is build via JavaScript). I have just under 40 projects on Github that I have created under the Magium moniker that includes Selenium testing, but also odd things such as Active Directory integration, and configuration management.

Following is a list of technologies that I have some level of professional competency:

• PHP
• Magento 1
• Magento 2
• MySQL / AWS Aurora
• MongoDB
• Redis
• AWS
• JavaScript / some NodeJS / a little Electron
• Zend Framework
• Vue and JQuery are my primary JavaScript frameworks
• CSS
• Java (primarily language level, not framework or ecosystem)
• Docker
• Git

But what does that experience buy you? Following is a list of statistics from a recent engagement. In the interest of openness, this engagement was a longer-term engagement. It’s not like these stats were gained in a week or two. I worked in a consultative and development role, working on a codebase from an upper-tier Magento agency.

• API throughput improvement by almost 10x (potentially 100x+)
• DB usage peak of 8% averaged from 25% averaged
  • “Averaged” means average of a 24 hour period
• Page caching increased 4x, reducing RDS by 30%
• Peak queue processing length reduced from 28k to zero
  • A quick explanation: an AWS queue was used to push inventory updates. Prior to updates we would have queue length spikes several times per week that would delay inventory processing for hours. After the update there were no noticeable delays in processing
• Cut CPU usage in half due to optimizations in product page
• Reduction in database query count by 50% with no reduction in functionality
• Reduction in frontend JavaScript processing time by 80%, DOM processing by 40%, reducing page rendering time by 2.5x

While I have done some frontend work I most definitely consider myself more of a backend developer/consultant. That said, frontend optimization, particularly from a performance perspective, is another place where I have contributed.

I have written three books on PHP, two of which remained on the publisher’s best-sellers list for several months. “The IBM i Programmer’s Guide to PHP“, “You want to do WHAT with PHP?“, and “Advanced Guide to PHP on IBM i“.

My rate is $175USD per hour.

Inquiries may be directed to [email protected]. Please include a brief description of the project with an estimation of typical weekly requirements.