Mark Shust

My mission at M.academy is to provide the best possible educational content for Magento training.

Magento Teacher & Founder

Mark Shust

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.

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.

More recently, I've been heavily interested in artificial intelligence, and how we can use it in our day-to-day programming workflow to enhance our output. I gave a talk this year at Meet Magento Florida that touches base on the recent developments of AI and how it can assist us in 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.

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.

GitHub stars for docker-magento
markshust/docker-magento is the most popular development environment for Magento.

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
The first issue of MageZine, 2019. You can download it at the MageZine Archive.
A quote by Mark from MageZine, 2019

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:

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