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Sam James

Principal Engineer & Magento Specialist at BigEyeDeers

41 Magento & Engineering Articles 97 Technical Documentation Guides 10+ years Web Engineering Experience

Sam James is a Principal Engineer with over a decade of experience building, securing, and operating large-scale Magento 2 and Adobe Commerce platforms. His work focuses on performance optimisation, infrastructure automation, DevOps pipelines, and incident response for enterprise e-commerce.

He regularly publishes in-depth Magento tutorials, security advisories, and production engineering guides based on real-world incidents and client environments.

Sam James's Areas of Expertise

Sam James writes about a range of topics drawn from his professional experience, helping readers explore key insights, strategies, and trends in Magento, DevOps, and E-commerce Engineering.

Most Recent Magento, DevOps & E-commerce Engineering Articles (41)

Adobe's Isolated Patch Strategy: A Community Response

Adobe's new monthly isolated patch approach for Magento creates maintenance burden. Here's how a community meta-package can help restore sanity to security patching.

Consolidating My Online Presence: Moving Blog and Docs to One Home

Why I’m consolidating my blog and documentation into my main site: reducing infrastructure, improving clarity, and strengthening my personal brand and SEO.

Strengthening Magento 2 Security in CI/CD Pipelines with Sansec Ecomscan

Learn how to integrate Sansec Ecomscan into Magento 2 CI/CD pipelines to detect malware, enforce security patches, and secure build artifacts. Step-by-step guides for GitHub Actions and Bitbucket Pipelines included.

AI Experiments for Frontend, SEO and UI Design

I rebuilt small projects to test AI for frontend, SEO and UI. Here’s what helped, what broke, and how I’d use it again.

Cloudflare Outage November 2025 - Retrospective

Cloudflare accidentally took half the internet down for half a day, right before Black Friday. What can we learn from this, and how can we engineer more resilient infrastructure to survive similar outages in the future?

Check if your Magento site is safe from Session Reaper (CVE-2025-54236)

How to guide on checking if your Magento 2 store is safe from the Session Reaper (CVE-2025-54236) exploit. And guidance on how to patch and secure your site if it is not.

Most Recent Magento, DevOps & E-commerce Engineering Documentation (97)

SDJ Docs: Production-Tested DevOps & Development Solutions

Production-tested DevOps, Magento, and Linux guides from 10+ years managing enterprise infrastructure. Real solutions to CI/CD, security, and performance problems.

DevOps & Infrastructure

Production DevOps documentation: CI/CD pipelines, Ansible/Terraform automation, monitoring strategies, and infrastructure deployment workflows.

Programming Languages

Programming language guides: Python environment management, version control, virtual environments, and language-specific development tooling.

Platform Guides

Platform documentation for Magento, Linux, Warden, and AeroCommerce: production operations, development workflows, and real-world troubleshooting.

Reference & Quick Guides

Quick reference guides and cheatsheets: diff utilities, Composer commands, and commonly-used development workflow shortcuts.

Fluentbit

Fluent Bit log parser collection: Fail2Ban, auth logs, and custom regex patterns for centralized log processing.

Stack Exchange Contributions

60+ Answers
1900+ Reputation

Sam is also an active contributor on Magento Stack Exchange, where he shares his expertise by answering questions and providing guidance to the community. His contributions cover a wide range of topics, including Magento development, performance optimization, security best practices, and troubleshooting complex issues.

  • File type .svg Error in image upload Magento 2.3.1

    Explained that they are disabled in the first place for security reasons, and provided a few ways to re-enable them if needed. View full Answer on StackExchange

    9 upvotes

  • Problems with friendsofphp/php-cs-fixer and php7.3

    PHPCS fixer is not supported above PHP7.2, explained options on how to install without dev dependencies, remove the package or downgrade PHP to a supported version. View full Answer on StackExchange

    6 upvotes

  • CollectRates in custom carrier is not called when weight is over zero

    Explained that the issue likely stemmed from not setting the max package weight correctly, which in turn would set the max package weight to zero. View full Answer on StackExchange

    5 upvotes

  • How to use systemd timer to replace OS system cron for Magento?

    Provided an example of a systemd timer and service file to run Magento cron jobs, along with instructions on how to enable and start the timer. View full Answer on StackExchange

    4 upvotes

  • Magento 2.3 secure your site back and front

    Provided an non exhaustive list of steps to help secure a Magento 2.3 site, including using WAFs, file/IP restrictions, Scanning Tools, Integrity monitoring and more. View full Answer on StackExchange

    4 upvotes