Building digital bridges: We speak to Tamara and Alejandro at Magicoders

Tamara and Alejandro enjoying the digital nomad lifestyle in Argentinian Patagonia with family

“I got into this because of my husband Alejandro, the second half of Magicoders – we work on all projects together,” starts Tamara, cofounder of Magicoders. Alejandro had been pursuing a successful career at Siemens, the German tech company, making it to regional director for Latin America, but he needed change. “Corporate life was not for him. He jumped into the void and took the knowledge that he'd developed for Siemens for over 20 years,” she continues.

“We started our own company, working remotely – back when you had to explain what that was!” she smiles. “After the pandemic, almost everyone knows about it, but we have been doing this for almost 15 years now.”

Tamara and Alejandro have been providing WordPress development services, even back when it was not common. They started working with platforms that connected freelancers with customers; the first one they worked with was Elancer then as they picked up experience and proved their value, they moved to more premium platforms, such as Codeable.

“I started doing the sales and project management and got into development little by little, to the point where we now both develop,” she adds. But this was still a way away from the current iteration of Magicoders. “We had a vision of being able to work from Uruguay, or from Argentina, or where we have friends and family in Brazil, just having an internet connection. We decided that's what we wanted to do and kept at it until we were full-time freelancers,” she remembers.

Products, services and work examples

Magicoders focus on WordPress, and membership websites but they also offer “pretty much everything under the sun, from full-site builds to specific tasks”, she explains. Where they really excel is complex projects with multiple moving parts.

“Plugins need to talk to each other. When something in one plugin happens, something in another plugin should happen, but this is not always the case. We are there to find the bridges and the connections between them,” Tamara explains. “We can come and bring it all together.”

Magicoders build “mini-systems” connecting different components together. The bigger a site becomes, the more plugins you have and the more moving parts that need to speak to each other. Inevitably this is going to cause problems.

Tamara's developer profile on Toptal

“WordPress development is different to other systems, where one company develops all the components. In WordPress, each plugin can be developed by a different company so, of course, there are gaps between the connections. We figure out how to customize them and make them do what they need to do.”

“We're working for a membership site at the moment that is connected to a social network plugin. Our customer needs to only allow certain features when you have an active subscription, but BuddyBoss does not have a membership function. We make sure you only get access to specific features if you have an active subscription. We built a backend for them so they are able to see who is subscribed, and gave them features allowing them to unsubscribe people,” Tamara continues.

The Magicoders work with Elasticsearch, especially for very large sites, as well as API integrations. If you have a WordPress website and you have a CRM, every time someone becomes an active subscriber, they can send that information over to the CRM.

Magicoders work with Elasticsearch

“We have a podcaster customer who has hired us to customize the way in which the podcast RSS feed displays the information of the title and the description dynamically, depending on who the subscriber is,” she adds. Usually, if you're an active subscriber, you can see protected content and if you're not, you can’t. But in this case Magicoders needed to protect the content for all users in certain situations, and allow all users to see protected content in certain circumstances. “We're there, customizing membership sites in specific ways,” she sums up.

We agree that some of the membership plugins in the WordPress ecosystem are fantastic, and often free, but they don't have that ability to be customized and continue to talk to other plugins. “This is where Magicoders come in! As well as WooCommerce, membership-based websites are one of our specialties,” she smiles.

One final example is a customer at AndroidIntel.net who had a specific request: whenever someone signed up, a counter would start recording how much time passed for when each user accessed certain features. Magicoders built a dynamic roadmap of those journeys: “She had built this design of a roadmap with different icons and colors, and we materialized that vision that she had.”

The future of Magicoders

“We have a very nice upcoming project, for a large membership website. They're having trouble keeping up with the activity in their server so we’ll use a third-party SaaS platform (in this case, Memberful) to offload a lot of the interactions that would have happened in the WordPress server and alleviate the problem.” Tamara and Alejando will also be moving their client’s podcast to a private feed, so that the media company will be able to monetize a premium podcast.

Alejandro's developer profile on Codeable

Tamara and Alejando have been working with Codeable for eight years now and have completed over 1450 projects with an impressive rating of 4.99. “We have a nice history of reviews from our customers there – and it gives you a feel of what we are about. We care a lot about listening to our customers' needs, thinking creatively, and pride ourselves on taking on different challenges and being able to see a simple path forward,” she adds.

We agree that, when there are so many moving parts in a project, if you're not careful you can make it even more complicated. “Actually, what you should be doing is simplifying it back down and making it really easy for the customer,” she concludes with a smile.

More information about Magicoders

To read more about Tamara and Alejandro and work with Magicoders, visit their profiles on Codeable or Toptal. Or to get in touch directly, go to magicoders.com/hire/.