An Interview with Gabriel Guarino: “… one of the main problems is not keeping Magento and the third-party extensions up-to-date.”
Editor’s note: The e-commerce market is growing from day to day, and the challenging battle between e-solutions becomes more and more fierce. Being one of the leading platforms, Magento solution always keeps up with the times to stay on top of the competition. Thus, we decided to present an interview with Gabriel Guarino, Lead Magento Developer and Magento Master. Together with Gabriel, we will explore the exciting moments of his successful career, find out the interesting facts about Magento and discover the predictions for the next year.
1. Gabriel, you have an impressive professional background. What was your dream job when you were a child? Do you mind sharing the brightest moments of your career path?
Thank you! I started thinking about my career when I was a teenager since I wanted to make a decision as early as possible to be able to invest time and learn everything I could before getting my first job.
I attended an onsite web development training for a year when I was 14 years old and shortly after that I was able to get my first client to start developing websites as a part-time job while I was in high school.
One of the brightest moments of my career was speaking at MageTitans USA in Austin, Texas in 2016. It was the first presentation I had to deliver in an event and it was in front of a big audience in USA. I had a great time during the event and it was my first time in the USA as well. After that, I delivered presentations in Meet Magento Argentina, Magento Imagine, MageTitans Mexico and meetups.
2. You have various certifications and solid experience working with Magento solution. Can you tell our readers what the advantages and disadvantages are of implementing the shopping cart?
By implementing Magento you will have almost all the features that you need for your eCommerce website. In addition to that, you can extend Magento to add any additional feature that you need and you have thousands of extensions in the Magento Marketplace to implement in your store.
However, you should work with an agency or freelancer that has experience in Magento to receive guidance and follow the best practices. It is easy for someone with not enough experience to make mistakes by implementing code that could affect the performance or implement many extensions leading to having a platform that is hard to upgrade and hard to maintain.
3. Since you deliver training and technical assistance for e-commerce organisations, you definitely know what are the most common questions among Magento users? What are the main issues in managing a Magento store? Why do these problems typically arise and how can one avoid them?
That is a very good question. When it comes to managing the store, one of the main problems is not keeping Magento and the third-party extensions up-to-date.
If you don’t update Magento and the extensions, you will have security risks (please, apply the security patches), the harder it will be to upgrade later (more versions to upgrade instead of applying smaller upgrades, one at a time) and you won’t have the features that are introduced in new releases.
Regarding the questions, I have received all type of questions and I expect to answer as many questions as the customer has. It is important to them to understand how Magento works in order to manage the eCommerce store with confidence.
4. In your opinion, how can Magento extensions help e-store owners expand the platform’s functionality and drive more sales?
You can add new features that will improve the user experience and that could have an impact in the conversion rate driving more sales, however, as I mentioned before, be careful about the number of extensions that you implement in your eCommerce store. The less extensions, the better.
5. As I can see from your profile, you are the author of “Magento 2 Beginner’s Guide.” Please, describe the essential points of the book and how Magento users can benefit from it? What are the future plans regarding new publications?
Basically, the book covers all concepts that a Magento user should know in order to manage their eCommerce store. I wanted to create a book that could serve as a guide for the users and that they could use as reference at any time that they have a question about a feature of Magento 2.
The book covers each area of the admin panel and important topics such us the migration from Magento 1 to Magento 2.
I am looking forward to see the progress of Magento PWA Studio and probably publish content related to the news from the new front-end architecture.
6. It is well-known that “nothing is perfect.” And although Magento is one of the leading shopping carts in today’s e-commerce world, competitors are not sleeping. Which Magento improvements can we expect in 2019?
Magento PWA Studio is the top feature I am looking forward to implement as soon as it is ready. In my opinion, it will be the biggest feature that Magento has ever released for the front-end and I am currently following its progress in Github to be ready as soon as we have the final version available to implement in Magento 2.
7. To conclude, as a keynote speaker, what e-commerce and Magento conferences would you recommend for our readers in the upcoming year?
If you are in the USA, Magento Imagine is the event that I recommend for you since you will have the opportunity to interact with the Magento community and we have people from all over the world attending the event. If you are in Europe, MagentoLive Europe is the second biggest Magento event. You will be able to hear the latest news and announcements in those two events and interact with the Magento community.
We want to thank Gabriel for the interesting answers about the main steps of his background and Magento platform. For sure, our readers will enjoy learning new information and implement useful insights into the working process.
