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How to attract Magento developers for your project

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Most people who follow our blog either are looking for a developer or are a developer themselves. And quality Magento developers are in high demand right now. So how do you get a top-notch developer to work on your project, Check out more from Palo Alto executive search services.

Seth Godin wrote a blog post today about how to be a great client. Personally, I would jump at the chance to work with a client who follows Seth’s suggestions. In fact, we decided to work with our clients because they fit several of the characteristics. Here is a copy of the post. I took the liberty of replacing “innovator” with “developer”. My guess is that our Magento developer following will strongly agree with the list.

As a client, your job isn’t to be innovative. Your job is to foster innovation. Big difference.

Fostering innovation is a discipline, a profession in fact. It involves making difficult choices and causing important things to get shipped out the door. Here are a few thoughts to get you started.

  1. Before engaging with the [developer], foster discipline among yourself and your team. Be honest about what success looks like and what your resources actually are.
  2. If you can’t write down clear ground rules about which rules are firm and which can be broken on the path to a creative solution, how can you expect the [developer] to figure it out?
  3. Simplify the problem relentlessly, and be prepared to accept an elegant solution that satisfies the simplest problem you can describe.
  4. After you write down the ground rules, revise them to eliminate constraints that are only on the list because they’ve always been on the list.
  5. Hire the right person. Don’t ask a mason to paint your house. Part of your job is to find someone who is already in the sweet spot you’re looking for, or someone who is eager and able to get there.
  6. Demand thrashing early in the process. Force [developers] and decisions to be made near the beginning of the project, not in a crazy charrette at the end.
  7. Be honest about resources. While false resource constraints may help you once or twice, the people you’re working with demand your respect, which includes telling them the truth.
  8. Pay as much as you need to solve the problem, which might be more than you want to. If you pay less than that, you’ll end up wasting all your money. Why would a great [developer] work cheap?
  9. Cede all issues of irrelevant personal taste to the [designer]. I don’t care if you hate the curves on the new logo. Just because you write the check doesn’t mean your personal aesthetic sense is relevant.
  10. Run interference. While innovation sometimes never arrives, more often it’s there but someone in your office killed it.
  11. Raise the bar. Over and over again, raise the bar. Impossible a week ago is not good enough. You want stuff that is impossible today, because as they say at Yoyodyne, the future begins tomorrow.
  12. When you find a faux [developer], run. Don’t stick with someone who doesn’t deserve the hard work you’re doing to clear a path.
  13. Celebrate the [developer]. Sure, you deserve a ton of credit. But you’ll attract more [developers] and do even better work next time if [developers] understand how much they benefit from working with you.

Magento Database Import Error: USING BTREE, KEY `FK_ATTRIBUTE_VARCHAR_ENTITY` (`entity_id`), KEY `FK_CATALO’ at line 9

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Tonight I was setting up a staging environment for a client of ours so they would have the ability to “visually” interact with the recent data migration our team has performed (OSCommerce to Magento, in case anyone was wondering).

Here’s the error I was receiving:

ERROR 1064 (42000) at line 382: You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ‘USING BTREE,
KEY `FK_ATTRIBUTE_VARCHAR_ENTITY` (`entity_id`),
KEY `FK_CATALO’ at line 9

The reason behind this is that there is an inconsistency in the way the export syntax was being handled as I imported into the staging environment (which evidently has a different MySQL version running). Thus, the staging site was expecting different syntax for the following:

--
-- Table structure for table `catalog_category_entity_varchar`
--
DROP TABLE IF EXISTS `catalog_category_entity_varchar`;
CREATE TABLE `catalog_category_entity_varchar` (
`value_id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
`entity_type_id` smallint(5) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
`attribute_id` smallint(5) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
`store_id` smallint(5) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
`entity_id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
`value` varchar(255) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
PRIMARY KEY (`value_id`),
UNIQUE KEY `IDX_BASE` (`entity_type_id`,`entity_id`,`attribute_id`,`store_id`) USING BTREE,
KEY `FK_ATTRIBUTE_VARCHAR_ENTITY` (`entity_id`),
KEY `FK_CATALOG_CATEGORY_ENTITY_VARCHAR_ATTRIBUTE` (`attribute_id`),
KEY `FK_CATALOG_CATEGORY_ENTITY_VARCHAR_STORE` (`store_id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB AUTO_INCREMENT=697 DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;

As a rule of thumb, one can either

  • (1) head over to the MySQL Developer Documentation for syntax reference
  • (2) or simply check out a recent Magento export from the server they are trying to import into and determine how the “USING BTREE” statement was handled. Likewise, I simply removed the following:
UNIQUE KEY `IDX_BASE` (`entity_type_id`,`entity_id`,`attribute_id`,`store_id`) USING BTREE,

and replaced it with this:

UNIQUE KEY `IDX_BASE` USING BTREE (`entity_type_id`,`entity_id`,`attribute_id`,`store_id`),

Hope this helps someone who is experiencing the same error and spending way too much time trying to understand the incompatible syntax.

Sorting Data from Custom Fields in WordPress

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With the redesign of the Ei Site, we wanted to take advantage of certain features native to WordPress, one of which was Custom Fields.

Having a custom web design based on the needs of your particular business and customers optimizes conversion rates of site visitors, a key aspect of growing your business and brand presence online

We wanted a simple way to display our client list using Custom Fields. Using built-in WordPress functions, it is pretty simple to pull information from Custom Fields. With Custom Field structure like this:

Name: client
Value: Name|Work_Done|Description|URL

You can use the get_post_meta() function to loop through all of the ‘client’ fields and pull the value for each and display to your page.

ORIGINAL CODE:

<?php
	$allOptions = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'client', false);
	if($allOptions) {

		foreach ($allOptions as $option) {
			$fullValue = explode ("|", $option);
			$name = $fullValue[0];
			$work = $fullValue[1];
			$text = $fullValue[2];
			$url = $fullValue[3];
		}

	}
?>

The problem comes if you want to control the way the output is displayed. The get_post_meta() function does not provide a SORT property. So in order to control the order of display, we simply added an additional component to the VALUE field, a ‘sort order’.

Name: client
Value: Sort|Name|Work_Done|Description|URL

Rather than just display the information in the initial foreach() loop, we stored the data into a new array, based on the SORT item for use later.

NEW CODE:

<?php
	$client_array = array();
	$allOptions = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'client', false);
	if($allOptions) {
		foreach ($allOptions as $option) {
			$fullValue = explode ("|", $option);
			$order = $fullValue[0];
			$client_array[$order] = $option;
		}
	}
	rsort($client_array, SORT_NUMERIC);
?>

With the data now stored in an sorted array, we can now loop through the new array and display the information in any order we want.

How the Symphony Will Help You Lead Your Business

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I took my wife to the symphony last week. We found our seats while the orchestra warmed up. Chaotic notes filled the air as musicians practiced and tuned their instruments. Music disappeared into silence when the conductor took his place on stage. The first chair violinist played a steady note and soon other sections joined in to create one harmonic sound. Now silence. Here’s the best part. My favorite moment of the night:

The conductor raised his baton.

And beautiful music begins. But don’t lose sight of the start. Think about it – over 100 highly trained professionals work together in one coordinated effort. Here is the best Business blog for you, do visit.  They restrain themselves for the better good of the music. They stop and listen. They watch the conductor with anticipation. The baton goes up. Now there is order where chaos lived only moments ago. They don’t play music. They make music. Click here to go to Concierge contracts website and ask for legal advice for your business. Field of Words provide you best online business stratergies.

Leadership Lessons from the Symphony

It’s a great lesson in leadership and teamwork, particularly for technology companies where skilled developers likely know more about code than their managers. I think we can learn a lot from the symphony. To illustrate, here is a wonderful presentation by the charming conductor Itay Talgam at a TED conference earlier this year. It’s about leading like the great conductors.

Talgam’s best comment is early in the video: “The joy is about enabling other people’s stories to be heard at the same time.” He goes on the explain that the music is a ride. Then he extolls the value of an orchestra where you know what you do and you become a partner in building the roller coaster while you are on the ride. Is a small (or large) technology company any different?

A few leadership approaches to avoid:

  • style: it’s about the interpretation of the music as the conductor sees it
  • style: the execution is more important than the interpretation
  • style: listen to one another to lead…you have to guess the conductor’s mind

Here is a final quote I’ll leave you with:

“Kleiber not only creates a process but he also creates the conditions in the world in which this process takes place.”

Search Fund Accelerator

As the first and most advanced accelerator in the search fund world, we created SFA with three bold objectives in mind:

  • To dramatically increase searcher and CEO success in finding, buying, and managing outstanding businesses;
  • To provide unparalleled resources and support from SFA staff and our committed investors who put their money and their reputations on the line, and;
  • To vastly increase our CEOs’ likelihood of financial success in comparison to that of the traditional model.

Shravan Gupta explains “They wanted to make choosing SFA a no-brainer. More support, better economics, and much greater chances of success minimize the risks searchers take on and maximize their rewards”.

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