Top Questions To Ask While You Hire A Magento 2 Developer

Magento is one of the best eCommerce platforms out there, allowing a lot of businesses to get into the commerce space and sell without limits. One way the platform goes above its counterparts is its open-source codes and the opportunity for developers to make a whole lot with them.

The more complex Magento 2 is an improvement from this and, when you want to hire a developer now, you want this individual to have the appropriate knowledge. You want to organize an interview that ensures that you get the most important areas of the framework covered.

Our article guides you through all you need to know about interviewing developers for Magento 2.

How Many Years Of Experience Do You Have With Magento 2 Development?

Although the length of years a developer has spent in the Magento 2 space does not directly determine the level of skill he/she has, it still serves as a major indicator.

Magento 2 is a platform with complex codes that come with a lot of challenges. Of course, these challenges have their solutions, but new developers usually don’t have enough experience to deal with the more complex issues.

They only have the required skills for building. Even where these skills are excellent, the lack of experience makes very difficult activities like migrating from Magento 1 to Magento 2 almost out of their league.

Selecting a more experienced candidate makes the hiring process more productive. However, as said earlier, the length of years in the development space does not determine whether they have appropriate skills. This brings us to our next question.

What Are The Magento 2 Projects You Have Successfully Completed?

Not all projects are the same. A developer may have had 6 years of experience with Magento, but his niche and preference for projects could be absolutely different from your vision. What use is his experience when he doesn’t have the specific expertise you want?

Additionally, you must understand that Magento 2 developers could be well versed with the building codes of the eCommerce platform. This means that the top experts probably have the expertise to build any type of store. However, as an eCommerce store within a particular niche, there are certain development elements and technologies that are optimal for you.

Only Magento developers with experience within your niche can choose the most optimal technologies, innovative ideas, best practices, or solutions for your store.

These are the reasons why you additionally have to inquire about the types of projects a Magento developer has taken on. An experienced Magento developer with expertise in your specific niche gives you an edge.

What Database Architecture Does Magento 2 Use?

Magento 2 makes use of the Entity-Attribute-Value (EAV) architecture and you definitely shouldn’t hire a developer that does not know this answer. EAV is the structure that is used to organize customers, products, address data, and other variables within the Magento database.

This architecture makes data retrieval extremely accurate as it deploys the use of three organizational elements. These are entity (which is the main source of data), attribute (which defines this data), and Value (which serves as a programmed identification for both the attribute and entity). When information about an entity is required (attribute), the value ID is used to make the retrieval of it accurate.

EAV is complex and is the subject of debate between different camps in the Magento 2 space. Nonetheless,  it ensures flexible data modifications without a need to go deep into the database schema. A flat table is also available within it for fast data retrieval, and this reduces some of the architecture’s complexity.

A practical example of why ESV is great is where a store sells clothing items for men, women, and children. The “entity” could be a t-shirt, the “attribute” could be “adult male”, and the value is then what ties the entity to the attribute within the database for accurate retrieval.

Is There Any Extra Magento Accreditation You Have?

To further cut down your list of candidates, you may demand additional educational experience with learning Magento. An educational experience assures you that a candidate has a comprehensive understanding of the framework. What’s more, is that accreditation also assures you that the knowledge has been tested by a trustworthy administrator.

The accreditations for Magento 2 include;

• Associate Developer
• Professional Developer
• Professional Developer Plus
• Certified Professional Front End Developer
• Javascript Developer
• Solution Specialist
• Cloud Developer

Make a research on the accreditations that fit your exact project and choose a developer that has certificates on it. This makes sure that you introduce a competent and reliable hand to your team.

Additionally, you also want to ensure that the accreditation was gotten at a more recent date. The Magento framework experiences constant improvements and changes from the developers, so you want to hire personnel that is trained in accordance with the more recent outlook of the platform’s framework

How Many Magento Deployment Modes Are There And What Are They?

There are three modes in which Magento 2 is deployed; Default, Developer, and Product. These three determine just how the platform works when you make use of it, and a proper Magento 2 developer is expected to know the intricacies of each of them.

The default mode is the immediate mode in which Magento is deployed, and is only used when there have been no changes to the codes. It makes use of Magento’s default settings and is not as optimized as other modes.

Production mode is the most optimal mode when the application is live, as it brings a balance for both user experience and developer activities. In the production mode, full pages are cached without affecting image sizes, errors are continuously stored in a backlog for future debugging, and files are kept in a pub folder for easy pulling. It also works up to 30% faster than developer mode.

Developer mode, as its name implies, is dedicated to developers. It remains the optimal deployment mode when you want to make customizations on the Magento 2 application or even when you want to install extensions. This mode runs slowly as the symlinks of all files are published to a pub/static/ directory.

In the developer mode, errors are always displayed on the screen for easy and immediate debugging, and static files are never cached.

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What Are The Best Practices For Magento 2?

You don’t want your website or application to perform poorly or lose accurate functionality when it is in use. Due to this, hiring a developer that knows and adheres to Magento 2 best practices is key. For reference, what are some of the best practices you may seek to hear from a candidate?

• Avoid editing core files as this may bring vulnerabilities to the application,
• Create reusable codes to save time and avoid duplications,
• Apply module development best practices like editing default codes to save time and maintaining proper naming conventions for files and folders,
• Enabling flat tables for easy data retrieval,
• Testing the code before deploying it for use,
• Using Magento 2 framework conventions rather than PHP functionality, and
• Repeatedly clearing cache, among others.

How Do You Easily Improve The Performance Of A Magento App?

There are a lot of tiny and almost unrecognizable changes a developer may make to improve the performance or efficiency of a Magento 2 application.

The candidate you choose to hire is expected to know these so that the development and early application management stages are put on the right track when problems arise. Some of the changes a candidate may mention that are pointers to adequate knowledge include

• Identifying bottlenecks with third-party modules and disabling modules that are not in use
• Enabling full-page cache and repeatedly ensuring it works at all times,
• Optimizing images by finding a perfect balance between size and quality,
• Minimizing CSS and Javascript codes. With CSS, avoid the use of expressions,
• Avoid repeated use of Magento logs,
• Implement GZIP compression,
• Get the fastest web application hosting service within your budget, and
• Optimize application servers, like removing unnecessary Ajax callbacks after page load.

What Are The Methods Of Overriding Functionalities

A developer is definitely required to know just how to make edits to the core functionalities of the Magento framework. In Magento 2, there are three methods to do this; Monkey patches, Rewrites, and Observers.

Monkey patches are the least preferable methods and involve copying the core and community code pools to a local code pool. This method involves copying the whole order or class of modules and making changes to it.

The Rewrite method allows developers to modify just one function or module in the class. This is done through a config file against the parent class of the specific module or function and is a better option than monkey patches.

Observers take advantage of Magento’s scripting for events and activities and involve changes to the framework’s behaviour and performance. With this method, the developer aims to intercept and modify the event before the target action. For example, where a developer wants to modify X and Magento deploys event Y for this, the developer makes changes to event Y instead and this affects action X.

What Are Magento UI Components And How Should They Be Rendered?

Magento UI components are important when it comes to the overall user experience within the website or application. You want the developer you choose to have an understanding of the importance of UI components and also know how to properly render them in the best way.

When you ask this question, you expect an answer referring to a combination of the XML declaration, Javascript class, and templates that form UI elements like tables, buttons, and dialogues, among others. These are the front-end elements that the users are expected to interact with while using the Magento 2 application.

Optimally, Magento 2 UI components are to be rendered using PHTML templates, XML layout, or jQuery widgets. Regardless of what is chosen, however, you also ensure that all UI components interact seamlessly with each other so that the user experience on the website remains great.

Move On To Technical Questions

Now that the more basic topics relating to Magento 2 have been covered, it is time to move on to the technical topics. Arguably, starting slow allows the candidates to be comfortable with the interview and also brings the best out of them for extended skill evaluation.

Some of the more technical topics include

• PSD and XHTML conversion,
• Module creation,
• Magento 2 file structure,
• Magento static blocks,
• Magento API usability,
• Optimal design patterns, and
• Dependency injection.

Are You Ready To Organize A Productive Magento 2 Interview?

After going through the questions, answers, and why related topics are important, we believe you now have a proper understanding of how your Magento interview should go. Ensure that the questions you ask directly relate to the specific project you want to create, and you choose the best developer that ticks all the boxes.

Understand the line between experience and expertise, and remember to start with the easier topics before getting into the more complex ones.

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