A couple of weeks ago I took on a new client (a large company) that was NOT using WORDPRESS. Yay me!! Finally some challenging work.
It’s a large store running under Magento. Magento is a massive, beastly ecommerce solution. Very powerful and highly scalable it can be used to run a gigantic online concern that interacts in highly specific and unique ways with its clients and its products.
Beastly is an apt description. This is supposed to be an MVC based programming. It’s done POORLY.
But that’s not the new skill set I am gaining. Magento reminds me of old Zen Cart. And Open Cart. Only not as well done. What I started learning is COMMAND LINE interaction with the server file system.
You can read the wiki article here.
This was a stretch for me. A real stretch. I am using putty and pcsp. I tried nano and grep…
Fail.
I was actually feeling ‘stoooooopid‘. This is somewhat like old DOS, which I was pretty good at back in the day. I still remember quite a few commands. But for some reason, my eyes crossed, my brain started singing the Manamana song… It was bad.
So I did what I would do with my kids – remediation. I went back to look at old DOS. Then I stumbled on to Windows Powershell – that was really good. Close to DOS and on my machine – no worrying that I was going to some how, magically, crash the server! (Why I thought that I have no idea). The I found a really well written tutorial on Learn Code The Hard Way.
Hallelujah!
What this tut gave me was some confidence. I did the exercises and got more comfortable with CLI and began memorizing new commands. Great!
Actually, super duper great! Having a large command vocabulary is more than desirable. This expands what one could do with CLI – obviously. CLI is like a magic pill that makes you fast! Especially if you dev in Drupal. Which I sometimes do. Drupal has DRUSH and DRUSH has everything!
Hopefully, over the next month, I’ll have achieved proficiency.
That’s my goal.