Starting with Magento on Monday

Having spent several years as a consultant with Zend, working with highly scalable applications, developing many of Zend’s training courses, building mobile applications and doing my best to be a generally good guy I am making the move to Magento.  More specifically, MagentoU.  Magento has, for several years, been a company that I have been interested in.  Their product is technically quite interesting and very powerful, but my interest has been in watching the company’s meteoric rise.

This rise is because they did a lot of things right.  From the start the system was designed to be expandable.  It was designed to be easily built upon without having to rewrite portions of the core code.  This allowed a community of developers and companies to spring up around the software which, in turn, generates a tremendous amount of activity.  So Varien, now Magento, built not just a software package, but provided the groundwork for an ecosystem to sprout and grow.

And grow it did.

But now, a new chapter starts in Magento’s life.

Me.

hehe.  More likely it’s the other way around 🙂

I will be a Technical Manager for Education and Consulting.  Sounds boring, right?  Not at all.  It is actually a very wide ranging position.  I will be teaching, developing courseware, driving self-education in the Magento community (blogging, videos, forums, etc.), provide support for training partners, execute consulting services, working with customers and partners and a whole bunch of other things.

This is an opportunity I am quite excited to be part of and I am quite thankful for having it.

… I’m also hoping that now that I have an “8-5” job, which I am well aware it will not be, that I will be able to carve out some time for writing a couple of tunes again.  When you’re trying to start your own company you tend to force those kinds of things to the backburner.  I’m hoping that I will be able to move it forward a little bit.  (and the world cheers!).