Amazing interview With Magento Frontend Developer Tobias Hartmann

Tobias is a designer/developer and a Magento enthusiast. He is currently working as a Magento Front-end developer at Sitewards. In this interview, Tobias shared his valuable insights regarding Magento and development practices. On a casual note, he even told us about the best places he has visited and shared his passion about hiking and trekking. So, let’s get to know him more and start with the interview:

Arpatech: Tobias, you are a front end developer of Magento. What is the best thing about front end development of Magento 2 version when compared with version 1?

Tobias: I would see myself as a front end developer who is currently working with Magento. For me, this is because I’m more into CSS, SASS, LESS, HTML, JavaScript and not so into XML and other Magento specific templating.

The best thing about Magento 2 Frontend… well, that’s a hard question, and we should see it from different angles. If we see it as the Magento System, compared to Magento 1, Magento 2 made the Framework very complete by adding “modern” front-end techniques like LESS processing, RequireJs, a Grunt workflow and some more interesting additions. By that, we could say the way how Magento 2 works with LESS is a quite interesting approach, and by integrating RequireJs and Jquery in the framework they did a great job. For the Magento ecosystem, a complete framework or environment can also be considered as a very good thing, I guess.

If we now see it as a front end developer who already worked with the newest technology like SASS, post CSS, etc., maybe within Magento 1 and had an established framework like foundation or bootstrap, there is no such best thing. Magento 2 kind of reinvented the wheel by building its own complex framework, using older technology like LESS and added additional complexity on top of the common workflows.

For me, what I also discussed in my talk on Meet Magento Netherlands this year, the Magento 2 framework is a very interesting one with all that additional complexity. But it seems not ready yet, not shaped enough to become a framework people love to work with. There are a lot of smart ideas behind its complex workflows and with the power of the community, this could become a very very powerful.

The only Problem, in my opinion, the community will most likely not go deeper into it, since we frontend devs already have a lot of complex things running and particularly want to get rid of them if you see nowadays discussions on tooling and the front end workflows.

Means, the one “best thing” is not yet there but together, the community and Magento, could build a more attractive, modern tool chain for front-end developers.

Read Complete Interview Here: http://arpatech.com/blog/the-power-o...bias-hartmann/