Interview: Jisse Reitsma

And it’s Friday again which means it’s time for the next Magento interview! After Vinai Kopp and Artyom Rabzonov it’s time for Jisse Reitsma!

Jisse is co-founder of Yireo, the Dutch company mainly know for it’s Magento-Joomla bridge solution called MageBridge. He is in charge of the companies development and you can connect with him online on Twitter and LinkedIn.

So let’s fill that gap in our knowledge and learn all about Jisse! :)

Jisse Reitsma teaching MageBridge

What did you dream of becoming as a child?

I actually dreamed of a standard mediocre life – a wife, kids and a house. Unfortunately I now have passed the 30 and I am still not there yet. What am I doing wrong?

My philosophy on life is…

Do good and you will receive good. It seems so simple, but it’s actually pretty hard some times.

What is your average day like?

A working day starts of with answering customers that have questions on both our free as our commercial Yireo extensions. That takes about 1 hour. After that, there is always projects or software development that ask attention. We tend the react quickly on feature requests, so things are never boring.

The ideal night out is…

Drinking a bit with friends or stroll down an avenue hand-in-hand with my girlfriend. I’m already happy with simple things.

I’m good at…

Object Oriented Programming in PHP.

I’m very bad at…

Sales.

What are you proud of?

Within a year and a half we have developed our MageBridge extension (a bridge between Joomla! and Magento) from the ground. Instead of being just a bridge, it has actually become a whole new technology of extending Joomla! with Magento extensions and vice versa. I’m pretty proud of the code base that has grown so rapidly, while the architecture is still fast and efficient.

How did you get involved in Magento?

I was actually forced into using Magento by business partner, who said Magento was going to be the next big thing. I’m always pretty stubborn when it comes to things like this, so I only touched Magento after three months.

I am (still/currently) involved with Magento because…

We are developing Magento extensions and giving Magento consults. Simply put: We are making good money with Magento.

What should every newcomer know about Magento?

Magento is a fantastic product, but it has a steep learning curve. If you’re just looking for a simple shop you will become very disappointed. However, if you want to take a dive and want to keep growing with your webshop, then Magento is definitively worth the effort.

Which feature would you really like to see added to Magento?

jQuery

And what feature would you really like to see removed?

ProtoType

What is the first extension you install in Magento?

Most of the time it’s our own MageBridge extension, because we simply sell more MageBridge webshops then Magento webshops.

What’s the first thing you would improve on magentocommerce.com?

Documentation. Everybody says that Magento is very complicated and that the learning curve is steep. However, there is little good documentation available. Luckily enough there are already many books out there about the administration of the Magento backend, but still – better documentation on webdesign and programming is still needed.

What are your plans with Magento in the (near) future?

With MageBridge we connect Joomla! and Magento, and while there are no big changes planned in Magento in the near future (upcoming months), there is still Joomla! 1.6 coming up – to make MageBridge compatible with Joomla! 1.6 will consume most of my time. But with Magento, we plan to release a couple of new versions for our Yireo Magento extensions. The usual stuff…

Complete the sentence “Magento changes the e-commerce landscape forever because…”

…it shows that commercial goals and open source ideals are indeed easy to combine.

Thanks Jisse for your cooperation! Next week I’ll interview Sherrie Rohde from Minerva Promotions. If you want to stay up-to-date, you can subscribe to the RSS feed, the Newsletter or my Facebook page.

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