About the Authors
Ray Bogman is an IT professional and Magento evangelist from the Netherlands. He started working with computers in 1983 as a hobby at first. In the past, he has worked for KPN, a large Dutch Telecom company, as a senior security officer.
He has been the CTO of Wild Hibiscus, Netherlands, since 2010, and cofounder and business creator of Yireo until 2011, Jira ICT since 2005, and CTO of SupportDesk B.V., which he cofounded in 2011.
At SupportDesk B.V., he is a Magento, Joomla, OroCRM, web / server / mobile performance specialist, and security evangelist. His focus during the day is business/product development and training webmasters and consultants about the power of Magento, from the basics up to an advanced level. He has trained over 1,000 Magento and 750 Joomla experts worldwide since 2005.
At Magento events such as Magento Developers Paradise, Meet Magento, and MagentoLive, he has been a regular speaker since 2009.
He has participated in reviewing Mastering Magento (2012), Mastering Magento Theme Design (2014), Magento Administration Guide (2014), Learning Magento Theme Development (2014), and the video, Mastering Magento (2013), all by Packt Publishing.
The writing of this book was a big thing for me. I spent every free minute with passion in writing this. I had many doubts to overcome this big challenge as a dyslexic person. But I never thought that writing this would give me lots of self-esteem, peace, and joy. This would not have happened without the loving support and patience of my wife, Mette, and daughter, Belize. Joining forces with my co-writer, Vladimir, was a lot of fun. Sharing thoughts and insights about our Magento passion was great.
Last but not least, I would like to thank all the people who made writing this possible.
Vladimir Kerkhoff is an experienced IT professional, 4-times Magento Certified Developer from the Netherlands, and working with Magento since late 2009.
Currently, Vladimir is the founder/owner of Genmato BV, a Magento extension development company. He is also available for cool freelance projects. Vladimir has had a long career in the IT industry. He started his career in 1992 in an IT company, managing customer corporate networks (Bionet, Novell Netware, and Windows Server). In 1996, he was the cofounder and CTO of Perfect InterNetworking Solutions (PINS), a large Dutch-managed hosting provider. After leaving PINS in 2009, he cofounded eFulFillers offering web shop fulfilment services based on the Magento platform.
The writing of this book was a nice new experience, forcing myself to pe into the new Magento 2 code and learn the new methods that are available.