Goodnight and Goodluck
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If you follow Magento closely there have been hints, but it seems like the cat’s out of the bag. Yoav Kutner, Magento’s co-founder and CTO, is moving on.
It’s easy to scoff at Magento’s complicated hierarchy, or the sometimes uneven coding style, or the engineered-not-designed UI, or one of the other countless decisions Yoav had to make while managing the technology team for Magento’s platform. Personally, I would have liked the see a more open development process, with core developers engaging directly with the community in a public way. We all have our own pet peeves about Magento’s code base, and it’d be easy to conjure up an imaginary axe to grind with the outgoing CTO.
All of which is easy to do — when you’re not the CTO.
Building a new technology platform, particularly in a business environment as hostile as ecommerce/online-retail, is hard. Really hard. There’s countless reasons OSCommerce was the stagnant standard for so long. Yoav’s decisions may not have made all the people happy all of the time, but they were the right decisions for Magento, and without someone to make those hard choices Magento may have ended up another also-ran in the shopping cart wars.
All of which is my long winded way of saying thank you, goodbye, and good luck to Yoav Kutner. None of us would be here without his 8+ years of hard work. Assuming he doesn’t buy a island off the coast of Spain and disappear, I’m sure we’ll be hearing more out of him in the years to come.