Yitz Willroth

I built a working Magento extension in 10 hours with Claude's help. But only because I told it "no, you're wrong" about a dozen times. Three examples from this week's build: The "unsolvable" bug. Claude insisted a database error was a known MySQL issue. Suggested different database versions, fresh installs, workarounds. I kept digging. Found an orphaned attribute reference in eav_attribute. One SQL statement fixed it. The missing 1,700 products. Our sync pulled 184 products. Magento had 2,043. Claude explained this was correct—those were "child products" not meant for display. Wrong. They were simple products with default visibility settings. Removed one filter, got all the data. The authentication argument. Claude wanted API keys on both ends for "bidirectional authentication." I pointed out all calls originate from our side. One key is all we need. Claude disagreed. I asked ChatGPT instead. ChatGPT agreed with me in one sentence. The finished product: a full RequestDesk extension with product sync, blog post management, admin panels, and proper API endpoints. Here's what I keep learning: AI accelerates development dramatically. Claude scaffolded the extension structure, wrote PHP classes, built admin controllers. Minutes instead of hours. But AI doesn't have domain knowledge. It didn't know simple products ARE the inventory in Magento. It defaulted to complex solutions when simple ones worked. The 10-hour build was possible because I knew when to push back. If I'd been learning Magento for the first time, I'd still be debugging that "unsolvable" database error. AI is a power tool. Domain expertise is what keeps you from building the wrong thing faster.

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Quick question 👀 Do you know the real cost of one in-house developer? Not salary. Everything around it. Most teams don’t. Here’s the part that usually gets missed: ✓ sourcing + interviews ✓ onboarding & ramp-up time ✓ payroll, taxes, benefits ✓ HR, legal, compliance ✓ replacement risk when it’s not the right fit Reality: → One in-house hire often costs 1.7–2.2× the base salary per year. → And productivity? 8–12 weeks at best. This is exactly why many startups switch to outstaffing once speed and predictability matter 📉 If you’re planning hiring for 2026, happy to walk through real numbers, not assumptions: https://lnkd.in/eNJF99p5 Don’t forget to repost to your network and follow Vitalii Vystavnyi for more.

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Hackers Are Targeting Magento & Docker Servers! A notorious threat actor called Mimo—previously known for attacking Craft CMS—is now targeting Magento e-commerce sites and misconfigured Docker instances. Their game? Cryptojacking and proxyjacking. For example, Mimo exploited CVE-2025-32432 in Craft CMS to install crypto miners. Now, they’re injecting commands into Magento via PHP-FPM vulnerabilities to deploy GSocket, a tool that gives them a secret backdoor. They even use a stealthy loader called 4l4md4r to stay invisible and install the XMRig miner and IPRoyal proxyware—two ways to make money by draining your CPU and your bandwidth. Even Docker isn’t safe! Mimo spins up malicious containers to spread further via SSH brute-force. Real-world? Think of an online store suddenly slowing down—turns out, it’s mining crypto for criminals. #MagentoHacked #DockerSecurity #MimoThreat #CyberAttack2025 #DigiAlert #Cybersecurity https://lnkd.in/gDFsuqYs

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When installing Drupal CMS 2.0, you get to choose between two different site templates: Starter and Byte. These aren't just themes. Site templates are actually a type of recipe that configures your entire site, not just its look and feel. Think of them more like installation profiles. ➜ Byte gives you a full demo site with the new Mercury theme. A clean, agency-style layout with pricing tables, feature grids, and all the components you'd expect from a modern SaaS site. ➜ Starter keeps things minimal, giving you a clean foundation for custom builds. Either way, you're getting a complete site configuration. Modules, content types, layouts, and functionality all packaged together and ready to go. Link to full tutorial and video below. #drupalcms #drupal ~~~ If you found this post helpful. ♻️ Please repost and follow. 📧 Join our newsletter; link in the first comment.

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🚀 Big .NET shifts ahead in 2026 and they’re already impacting the talent market. I’ve just read a great overview of the top .NET trends, and it aligns strongly with what I’m seeing in Software Engineering recruitment: 🔹 Modern .NET skills are now essential, not optional especially with the latest LTS releases and performance-focused C#. 🔹 AI-native development is becoming standard. Experience with tools like Copilot, ML.NET, and Semantic Kernel is increasingly expected. 🔹 Cloud-native architecture dominates hiring needs, particularly Azure, microservices, and containerization. 🔹 Security-first engineering is rising fast, with DevSecOps and Zero-Trust now core competencies. 🔹 Blazor and MAUI are gaining real traction, driving demand for full-stack .NET developers. 💡 In short: .NET roles are evolving quickly, and companies are looking for engineers who can blend cloud, AI, and modern development practices. Have a read of the full article here: https://lnkd.in/ef5nMpD3 If you’re exploring opportunities or building a .NET team, I'm happy to connect.

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"Cracked dev" is the 2025 equivalent of Rockstar dev, 10x dev, killer dev or whatever. If you are using this expression in seriousness, either irl or on a job spec, please reassess your ability to perform any sort of hiring based tasks, your overall value to your employer, your career prospects and even your wider life choices. gm

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Contractors aren't just a quick fix - they're a smart solution for KYC remediation, if you use them right! Here's how to get it right: ✔️ Accelerate delivery without burning out your BAU team. Deploy contractors to tackle routine but essential KYC remediation tasks, freeing up your internal team to focus on oversight, exceptions, and long-term risk controls. ✔️ Use the right people for the right tasks. Remediation work may be repetitive, but it still demands regulatory knowledge, attention to detail, and delivery discipline. The best contractors have done this before, and that experience keeps QA pass rates high. ✔️ Structure for outcomes, not admin. Don't just fill seats. Assign contractors to clear, outcome-driven workflows with measurable targets. Whether it's periodic reviews or outreach, every role should support progress and reduce rework. Done properly, contractor delivery is effective, scalable and compliant! If you're building or struggling to scale a KYC remediation team, happy to share what's working well in the market. #kycremediation #contractordelivery #aml

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🐘 "PHP Grew Up. Did You Notice?" PHP in 2024 was a completely different language than the one you're making fun of. I get it. The old jokes write themselves. mysql_query(). Global state everywhere. $_POST['whatever']. I lived through that era too. I have the scars. But here's the thing, while a lot of us moved on and kept dunking on PHP from the sidelines, the language kept shipping. Quietly. Consistently. Every year. PHP 8.0 brought named arguments, match expressions, and union types. PHP 8.1 brought enums, fibers, readonly properties, intersection types. PHP 8.2 brought readonly classes, new random APIs, and a serious cleanup of the deprecation backlog. That's not maintenance. That's a language that's actively evolving. Over the next few weeks I'm going to walk through the features I wish I'd paid attention to sooner. Not with docs-style explanations, just real examples of how they changed the way I actually write code day to day. If you still think PHP is stuck in 2009, stick around. I think you'll be surprised. Feature 1: Readonly Classes You were writing 3 files to do what one keyword now does For years, making a truly immutable object in PHP felt like a punishment. You'd write a class, make all the properties private, write a constructor, write a getter for every single property, add a docblock, hope nobody on the team did something creative with reflection... and then do it again for the next DTO. Every. Single. Time. PHP 8.2 just added readonly class and I genuinely felt a little embarrassed about how much boilerplate I used to write. The readonly modifier on the class means every single property is automatically readonly. No setters. No accidental mutation. No defensive getters. You can still make properties public because nothing can change them after construction anyway. This is the kind of feature that makes your DTOs, value objects, and API response models genuinely pleasant to write. I've refactored probably a dozen classes since this landed. Each one got shorter. None got worse. What pattern do you use for immutable data transfer objects? Still doing the old approach? #PHP #PHP82 #WebDevelopment #CleanCode #PHPGrewUp #BackendDev #BackendDevelopment

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Chunking and snippet extraction has been a huge focus lately - my latest blog dives into some of the work we've done on this to date, including support for a chunk rescorer in our semantic reranking retriever, as well as some useful ES|QL primitives to get more visibility into chunks and snippets. #elasticsearch #semanticreranking #snippets #chunks #chunking #esql https://lnkd.in/e6UD7iii

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Is NGINX + PHP-FPM becoming obsolete? 🚀 The "Worker Mode" revolution is here and the performance gains are impossible to ignore. I just dropped a deep-dive benchmark pitting the two heavyweights of the modern PHP ecosystem against each other: FrankenPHP vs. RoadRunner, running on Symfony 8 and PHP 8.4. We didn't just test "Hello World." We pushed them through real-world scenarios: ✅ Database Writes & Doctrine ORM ✅ Heavy Serialization (API Platform style) ✅ CPU-bound Matrix Multiplication ✅ Memory Leak & Restart Stability The Results? Both runtimes decimated the traditional FPM setup, offering 3x-4x throughput gains in database scenarios. 🔹 RoadRunner proved to be a beast in raw stability and ecosystem maturity (Queues, gRPC). 🔹 FrankenPHP shone with its incredible simplicity (single binary!) and winning Time-To-First-Byte on heavy serialization tasks. If you are building high-performance Symfony applications in 2026, you need to understand these architectures. 👇 Read the full benchmark analysis and GitHub repo: [https://lnkd.in/daCmrwDj] [https://lnkd.in/dbunCVbS] Which runtime are you betting on? Let's discuss in the comments! 💬 #Symfony #PHP #FrankenPHP #RoadRunner #WebDevelopment #Backend #Performance #TechLeads

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No FPM, No Problem 🚀 Slides are wrapped for my talk tomorrow at International PHP Conference , expect a little #PHP history, and a whole lot of future. I’ll be diving into how to build custom PHP runtimes with #FrankenPHP and Go, no FPM required. Learn how to compile PHP into a single binary and extend it seamlessly with Go. #php30

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The “Nice” Dev Who Slows You Down They’re polite. Cooperative. Friendly. But they don���t push back. They don’t cut scope. They never ask, “What’s the impact?” You hired a coder when you needed a co-founder. In interviews, ask: “Tell me about a time you said no to a feature and were right.” If they’ve never pushed back, you’re not hiring a partner. You’re hiring dead weight.

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The debate on vibe coding isn't new. In fact, I've seen it before...just with turntables instead of terminals. And I was on the wrong side. DJing is where I got started with music. Before DJ schools and before Serato. Skills were earned. Vinyl was expensive and collected over time. There were no shortcuts. The only path to success and respect was practice and dedication. When Serato arrived, it lowered the threshold for everyone. A $20 record became a $2 iTunes purchase. Collections became sharable. Record stores (the nexus of DJ community) slowly closed down. Non-DJs took advantage and the age of the celebrity DJ began. DJ schools revealed secret techniques previously held closely. I was saddened. Something had been lost. I'll even admit I felt a little bitter. But if I learned one thing, it's that this mentality will get you nowhere. I see the same conversations happening now with AI and music software. The "right way" vs the "wrong way." I'll tell you a secret: If I had worried myself about the right way to do things, The Audio Programmer would have never got off the ground. I would have defeated myself before I even started. I was recently at NAMM and spent time in the DJ section. DJ tech has had the biggest sales uptick in music tech over the past few years. And you know what's most exciting? Watching 11 and 12 year olds DJing on stage with skills I could have never dreamed of at that age. That wouldn't have been possible without the breakthroughs of the past 30 years. Yes, we lost a certain "exclusivity," but what has been won is so much greater. The best part about DJing is that the traditionalists that embraced the new generation became the guides for the next. I dream of that day for audio software. But to get there, we need to encourage the next generation to get their hands dirty. Just get in there and try things. If it doesn't work, fix it. Vibe it if you need to...just be creative and let your imagination roam free. Some of the people I respect most aren't debating...they're building. Oliver Larkin has openly credited Claude Code as the catalyst for what he's building with iPlug3. Stanford's Julius Smith is using AI to extend his research. This year will be a roller coaster ride, and I'm excited to see how it unfolds. Keep creating!

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