About 10 years ago I was dreaming of my personal Web Studio. I knew nothing about Web Technologies and languages required to start, however, my friends Sergii Varchenko and Igor Melnichenko presented at my 18th birthday a gift – “How to create a website” and “HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in practice” books. It was the best present ever. I was reading and tried every single example from these books and was impressed by how fast the result appears in the browser (of course, it was Internet Explorer 6).

Unfortunately, there was no one who could help me with advice or give me a good tip. However, I realized that there is no way back. In a while, I created a few personal websites. By the way, my “salary” for the very first project was a “C++ for professionals” book. Don’t ask me why C++ :), I was sure to come back to a compiler-based language.

After I’ve created few features using PHP (e.g. creating and reading News content into files and basic login page) for one of my project I was engaged in learning PHP language more and more. My new PHP book with a total number of 1200 pages burned all my free time.

In a few years of extensive learning, I started my own “Mcs Web Studio” studio. We were working together with Frontend Developer. Majority of my time I mostly did dirty backend PHP/MySQL work. I get some experience in web architecture design, different development techniques. In addition to this, I’ve created 3 home-made CMS frameworks. For one of the eCommerce websites, I’ve used the so-called Entity-Attribute-Value to easily manage product characteristics.

That one of the main reasons I got offered in Magento (or Varien) company back in 2010. There were 2 great teachers Vitalii Korotun and Ivan Chepurniy put my knowledge to the next level. I’ve worked in different departments starting from Professional Services (later re-named to Expert Consulting Group), Magento Saas/Go and Magento 1 Core team.

Currently, I am working as a Software Development Manager (in Commerce Services Leadership Team together with Max Yekaterynenko) at Magento 2 project. We are working hard to release Magento 2 Merchant GA release which is scheduled Q3 2015.

Really few words about my Firedrakes and Vanilla teams: THEY ARE GREAT. They teach me a lot. Guys are super smart and fun. Namely: Anton Kaplya, Sergii Ivashchenko, Misha Logvin, Vladyslav Shcherbyna, Andrii Gurzhiy, Dima Voskoboinikov, Olexandr Lysenko, Anton Guz, Denys Rul, Dima Vilchinskiy and Nadia Kalinovich.

This year I have 5 years anniversary working in Magento Inc. I decided to celebrate it by creating a personal blog and share my experience and knowledge about Magento.

Stay in touch and have a great reading.

Max