Magento 2 and avoiding the rabbit hole

My Talk at Mage Titans Italia 2016

Earlier this year, Mage Titans strode in to Europe via Milan, Italy. Alessandro Ronchi and the team at Bitbull did a fantastic job of putting the event together. Their hard work and the quality of speakers, along with the enthusiasm amongst attendees, made Mage Titans Milan a great success. I was lucky enough to be one of the speakers on stage discussing my experience around debugging a problem in Magento 2.

Specifically, I wanted to share the benefits I had experienced with using the Pomodoro Technique when in debugging situations.

The problem itself was related to having the whole site served over HTTPS and the fact that the navigation menu disappeared when using Varnish for the FPC (Full Page Cache), I used the Pomodoro Technique to help focus my approach and minimise any time wasted by going down the wrong path.

What resulted was a journey to understand how FPC and Varnish worked in Magento 2, in particular how the navigation menu relies on ESI (Edge Side Includes) to render its content. This then continued to uncover that the ESI links were absolute and that Varnish by default would ignore HTTPS requests. A Varnish configuration change can change this behaviour and fix the issue.

Please check out my talk below and let me know if you have any thoughts or feedback.