Mark Shust

My mission is to provide the best possible educational content for Magento training, getting you to that "ah ha!" moment as quickly as possible.

Magento Teacher

Mark Shust

M.academy was created in early 2019 by me, Mark Shust. I remember the days of extreme frustration trying to learn Magento 2, and I didn't want anyone else going through the pain and struggle that I went through.

So, I decided to create the ultimate resource to learn Magento. By taking complex concepts and breaking them down into simple and easy-to-understand lessons, I strongly believe that anyone with the desire to learn Magento can finally do so with my course curriculum.

Experience

I have over 20 years of web development experience working with PHP, MySQL, and the LAMP/LEMP stack. Having also been extremely interested and involved with open source programming, I dove 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 inevitable.

Mark presenting at Magento Imagine 2012 in Las Vegas regarding Magento best practices
Me presenting at Magento Imagine 2012 in Las Vegas regarding Magento best practices.

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.

Mark presenting at Meet Magento New York about Docker-based development environments.
Me presenting at Meet Magento New York about Docker-based development environments.

I've recently been interested in how artificial intelligence can be used to both enhance our development workflows and improve learning experiences. In 2023, I presented a topic at Meet Magento Florida that covered developments in AI, and how LLM's can be used to assist with writing Magento code.

Mark presenting at Meet Magento Florida 2023 about AI + Magento.
Me presenting about using AI with Magento in Meet Magento Florida 2023.

Over the last few years, I've also been honored to be part of the speaker selection committee at multiple Meet Magento events, helping to select the best speakers and topics for the community. There has also been a growing interest by the Magento community in live, developer-focused workshops, and I have also been involved with organizing and presenting at these events.

Mark talking about best practices at Meet Magento Florida 2024.
Me talking about best practices at Meet Magento Florida 2024.
Mark presenting a live workshop about Magento solution architecting and estimates at Meet Magento Florida 2024.
Mark presenting a live workshop about solution architecture, and how to determine Magento time and budget estimates at Meet Magento Florida 2024.

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. This is when I started creating "docker-magento", a project that utilizes Docker and containerization to help standardize the creation of Magento development environments.

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.

GitHub stars for docker-magento
markshust/docker-magento is the most popular development environment for Magento, and the most-starred Magento-dedicated GitHub repository besides Magento itself.

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.

The first issue of MageZine, 2019
I was featured in the first issue of MageZine, 2019. You can download it from the MageZine Archive.
A quote by Mark from MageZine, 2019

I've also written a lot about Magento best practices, including technical articles such as Best Practices for Magento 2 Programming for the Magento Association.

Certifications

While I believe that real-world experience is much more important than a piece of paper, certifications can still help to prove a level of core competency and understanding of the underlying platform, architecture, and its concepts.

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

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.

The goofy Shust family