About M.academy

Meet Mark

M.academy was founded in early 2019 by me, Mark Shust. Remembering those early days of extreme frustration learning Magento 2, I decided to put my previous experience recording screencasts to work and create the ultimate learning resource for Magento.

I noticed other resources teaching multiple concepts at once, making it extremely difficult to learn the platform. So, I starting breaking down concepts into simplified lessons, and knew I was on to something.

Experience

I have over 20 years of web development experience, and have been working with PHP for about as long. Soon after starting development, I became extremely interested and involved in open source programming, diving into various PHP frameworks over the years including OSCommerce, Drupal, and Laravel.

I became certified as a Zend Certified Engineer, which eventually lead me into the world of Magento. After hearing about its use of the Zend Framework and working with OSCommerce on quite a few projects, the transition to Magento was an inevitable one.

Later in my development career, I went on to present topics about Magento at venues such as Magento Imagine and Meet Magento New York, covering different topics such as development best practices and orchestrating development environments.

Docker & Magento

Before trying to learn Magento 2, I was upset about how difficult it was to get a development environment setup on my Mac. That's when I started creating `docker-magento`, a development environment for Magento based on Docker containers.

docker-magento contains an automated one-line script to install Magento 2, and works on all major operating systems. Over the years. It has become the go-to resource for Magento development.

Articles & publications

I've written hundreds of articles about PHP, JavaScript, Docker, Magento, and many other open-source frameworks & libraries. My writing has been picked up by various publications including the first issue of MageZine, the must-have journal for the Magento community.

I've also written a lot about best practices for frameworks like Magento, including the Best Practices for Magento 2 Programming article for the Magento Association.

Certifications

While I believe real-world experience is much more important than certifications, certs can help prove a level of core competency & understanding of the underlying platform.

I hold a few certifications around my focus of PHP and Magento:

• Adobe Certified Professional (ACP) - Magento Commerce Developer
  (April 2019)
• Adobe Certified Expert (ACP) - Magento Commerce Business Practitioner
  (February 2019)
• Magento 1 Certified Developer Plus
  (March 2012)
• Zend Certified Engineer (PHP5)
  (July 2010)

Personal

I'm married to my wonderful wife Juliann, and we are the proud parents of twin girls Lily & Brielle. I live in Northeast Ohio and love eating chipotle burritos, solving Rubik's cubes, driving my 240sx, and watching Cleveland Browns games.

We are all big fans of Disney, very goofy & unique, and wouldn't have it any other way.