The Obama Foundation and the American Museum of Natural History

Context

At Event Network I was Senior Lead Magento 2 Developer on a portfolio of 18 Magento 2 storefronts for museums, zoos and cultural attractions. Two of them carried more visibility than the rest: the Obama Foundation's official store, shop.obama.org, and the store of the American Museum of Natural History. I led development on both.

The challenge

Stores like these are an extension of the institution's name. They ran on a shared Magento 2 codebase with the rest of the portfolio, so a change made for one store could reach the others, and a checkout problem would be seen by the public and by the institution's leadership. The work had to move at the institutions' pace without putting that trust at risk.

What I did

• Worked directly with executive leadership at both institutions and turned their requests into scoped, reviewed changes.
• Owned the release process for the shared codebase: the Git workflow, pull-request review and approval, and every deployment.
• Protected checkout. After a deploy broke checkout across the storefronts, I built a Selenium/Chromium regression suite that runs cart, checkout and payment against staging before every deploy, and added monitoring so failures alert the team, not customers.
• Kept the stores connected to the ERP and POS integrations that synced inventory, orders and fulfillment between the museum shops and the websites.

Outcome

Both stores ran under the same release discipline as the rest of the portfolio: every change reviewed, every deploy mine, and checkout regressions caught on staging before a release instead of by customers. Both stores run on Shopify today (shop.obama.org and shop.amnh.org).