# The Obama Foundation and the American Museum of Natural History

Case study · High-profile, high-trust stores

Trusted with two of the most visible stores in the portfolio, I worked directly with executive leadership at the Obama Foundation and the American Museum of Natural History, and every change to their stores went through review and a deploy I owned.

- Role: Senior Lead Magento 2 Developer
- Where: Event Network, 2021–2025
- Stack: Magento 2, Multi-store on a shared codebase, PHP, MySQL, Varnish, Redis, Elasticsearch, CDN, Selenium / Chromium, ERP & POS integrations (REST, GraphQL)

## 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 physical 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](https://shop.obama.org) and [shop.amnh.org](https://shop.amnh.org)).

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Canonical: https://www.michael-kuhlman.com/work/obama-foundation-and-amnh