The Hussey Coding blog

15 February 2021

Developer Connection - Knowledge is power

It is widely believed that Sir Francis Bacon first spoke the famous words "knowledge is power!”

This famous phrase has been mentioned and written in emails, memos, board meetings and conferences all over the world! But when it comes to the traditional market place, this widely accepted and repeated philosophy seems to be missing in action.

Common sense would dictate that the more information available about a project and or a developer beforehand would increase the success rate and satisfaction of all parties. Though it is also fair to say that you may not want to give every detail of your project away or need to reveal your school exam results on your CV, there is a lack of vital information in some cases. I wish we were talking about trivial information here but we're not! Necessary things like budget, time scale and availability are all extremely important in the development process and yet so often these things are missing from project specs.

So who’s to blame for this? Is it the service? Is it the clients, store owners or developers fault? Truth be told, the mess belongs to everyone! There are store owners and clients unwilling to give specific details on projects, things like deadlines or budget, developers who don’t give realistic timescales in the fear of not securing a project and services that encourage this environment of confusion and frustration by not asking parties to provide essential information. Too often you see badly written project specs that developers are tripping over each other to "win", writing proposal after proposal filled with unrealistic promises while services are happy to let this happen as long as you use them.

Enter Developer Connection where we have created a quick, easy and detailed project creation form for store owners to fill out. This project creation form is specifically designed to provide developers with all the information they need by making many of the questions mandatory, things like "How long do you expect the project to take?" and "What version of Magento is the project for?"

Likewise, there is a process where developers can input their availability, qualifications and specialist areas to help clients choose the best developer for their project. Developers won't need to write endless proposals either, because their developer profile will be their proposal so as long as they create a great, eye-catching profile, they'll have no problems.

Next week, we’ll dive into the finer details of this process. For now, we’ll leave you with this. If knowledge truly is power and the traditional market place is content to leave itself and it’s users in a position of informational drought, maybe it's time for something new? Come and join us at Developerconnection.co.uk and take back your power!

Thank you for letting us be a part of your day, drop us a comment or join us on our social media sites listed below, we would love to hear from you, but until then stay safe and have a great day.

You can also join all the fun on our various social media profiles
Facebook - facebook.com/husseycoding
Twitter - twitter.com/husseycoding
LinkedIn - linkedin.com/company/hussey-coding

Sign up to developer connection at www.developerconnection.co.uk
Facebook - facebook.com/DeveloperConnection
Twitter - twitter.com/devconnectionuk
LinkedIn - linkedin.com/company/developer-connection

11 January 2021

Developer Connection - Hire the right UK Magento developers for your project.

In case you didn't notice, we recently overhauled our whole website and branding and to celebrate, over the next few week's we'll be taking a fresh look at everything Developer Connection has to offer both Magento developers and store owners alike.

Developer Connection is purposefully designed to be a Magento specific marketplace for developers and store owners to enjoy fast, easy, professional experiences while building long-lasting business relationships with others using the service.

There are many other services out there that claim to have this same vision while claiming to be different and be the best. Though we're not here to claim these things, we believe that we offer both clients and developers something unique, fresh and unrivalled.

We'll be making direct comparisons between Developer Connection and some of the more popular services in an upcoming blog, for now, we're going to look at the wider traditional market place to see how Developer Connection is different in 3 key areas.

One of the biggest problems with all of these services is hidden fees! Hidden fees are where the majority of these services make their money. Either by splitting the cost between freelancer and client or palming off the total amount to one or other. There's no escaping the reality that someone IS paying more than they NEED to, to the benefit of the service providers.
Developer Connection has NO hidden fees. Everything is upfront and there for you to see before you push that payment button.

Another issue with the traditional marketplace is communication.
Services will do everything they can to get you to use their service for everything and package it with a bow under the guise of convenience. What many people are unaware of is the small print that says if you connect with your chosen developer or client using any tools outside of the ones the service provides, then you are likely to be barred from the service or have your account permanently deleted.
We hate this! It creates this atmosphere of distrust and pressure between client and freelancer and is very "big brother is watching".
At Developer Connection, all we do is connect people, so you are free to use the tools you're used to and communicate outside of our service.

There's also the amount of information that's required by the service.
Many of these services require minimal information on projects, pricing and deadlines and often leaves developers chasing project details and store owners waiting for results. This again creates this friction between all parties involved.
As a development company ourselves, we understand the need for precise and clear information so created a quick but detailed way for store owners to communicate their needs and for developers to showcase their abilities and communicate their availability to clients.

Over the next few weeks, we'll be taking a closer look at these 3 issues and more as we compare Developer Connection with the other services out there in the traditional marketplace.
Thank you for letting us be a part of your day. If you have any questions about Developer Connection, please feel free to contact us using the details below. Until then, stay safe and have a great day.

20 September 2020

Why choose Evolved Caching?

Hi everyone and welcome back to another edition of

the Hussey Coding blog.

Last week we revealed to the world that our extension for the Magento 1 platform, Evolved Caching, is now free for download. However, I know what you're thinking, "Just because it's free, doesn't mean it's worth it!"

In today's article, we'll task the question...

If you're on the search for a full-page caching solution for your Magento store you have probably seen a wide range of solutions with seemingly more on the way all the time. So why should you pick Evolved Caching over other solutions?

Evolved Caching offers not only the best performance in the market place, but it's also a significantly more advanced solution than competing products. In performance terms Evolved Caching is comparable to Varnish, meaning you are likely to achieve the same time to first byte (TTFB). If you want to use Varnish, then you can integrate directly and have both Varnish and Evolved Caching serve your cached pages. Evolved Caching will also allow Varnish to cache many more pages than other Varnish only extension solutions. PageCache powered by Varnish, for instance, stops serving cached content altogether as soon as you add a product into the cart.

Evolved Caching can achieve the same TTFB as Varnish because of how it serves cached content compared to other solutions. Most solutions pull the cached content then populate the cached page with dynamic data (i.e. mini cart, header links, etc.) before delivering anything to the browser. This means you'll have to enter the Magento framework to generate the cached content, which is always going to be slow! Why? Well, every time you do this, you'll need to run thousands of lines of code and execute a large number of database requests. This has a direct impact of how long it takes the server to deliver content to the browser and therefore your TTFB.

Evolved Caching is different because it delivers the cached content to the browser immediately giving an excellent TTFB. It then populates the page with dynamic content after it has been delivered to the browser. It can populate the page with dynamic content in 2 ways, either via an AJAX request or via BigPipe. It was the first solution to use AJAX, and the only solution to offer BigPipe as an option.

Whichever method you pick you are going to have the cached page content delivered to the browser quicker and therefore achieve a better TTFB. To give you an idea of how much faster Evolved Caching is, when looking at other solution demo's, we see the server taking around 30% of the time to generate HTML for each page (600ms without caching, 200ms with.) If you have a look at our benchmarks, you will see you are looking at less than 0.5% of the time to generate HTML for each page.

So performance and TTFB is one reason to implement Evolved Caching over other solutions, but, increased performance isn't the only benefit! Evolved Caching has a totally different approach to keeping the cache up to date. Many other solutions rely on a cache purge and crawl cycle to refresh the cache. This means that the entire cache is likely cleared and rebuilt on a daily, or a more regular interval. When making updates to your site's content you may not see those changes reflected until this cache purge and crawl cycle has been completed.

Evolved Caching is totally different in its approach.

The aim right from the start was to make it a hands-off solution that just works, keeping your cache always primed and up to date. Only the relevant cached pages are rebuilt, for instance, when saving a product, category or CMS page. It also caters for caching scenarios that other solutions don't like rebuilding the cache for time-limited, storewide design changes, applying to a product, category or CMS page. The same is true for other time-limited features such as special or limited product prices.

Basically once a cached page has been created, you should never have to delete it, and it should always be kept up to date automatically. However, should you find that you do need to clear your full page cache, Evolved Caching includes the functionality to crawl your site, creating a basic cache as a starting point. It also allows you to regenerate your entire cache in case you want to make a site-wide design change that affects every page like the header or footer.

Another reason to favour Evolved Caching over other solutions is the options it gives you in how you want to store your cached content. You can cache to files, APC, Memcached or Redis with memory-based cache storage being faster on average than files. Although some solutions offer different caching backends, many don't and only cache to files.

Evolved Caching was also developed to make it easy to configure for your install. Other solutions require some development knowledge to hole punch any but standard blocks from caching - so, you need to create an XML configuration file defining extra blocks to exclude. Evolved Caching instead provides a frontend URL helper argument, ?show names. Append this to any frontend URL and the block names will be displayed, just add any of these names into the extension config in admin and that's it - no development knowledge required! You can equally add in pages by URL to be excluded from caching from admin, i.e. cart, checkout, customer login area etc.

These things are really just touching the surface of what the extension can do compared to competing solutions and you can read a lot more in our documentation or you can get your FREE copy from our store at

https://store.husseycoding.co.uk/

or on GitHub at

github.com/husseycoding/evolvedcaching

Thank you for joining us today, as always please consider liking, sharing and spreading the love on your favourite social media platforms using the #HusseyCoding. Until then, stay safe and have a great day.