Insights
Notes on Shopify, performance and shipping products.
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The demo is the deliverable
Gathering requirements, reviewing designs before they are built, and showing non-technical people how to use what you made - the parts of the job that decide whether the code was worth writing.
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When Shopify is too much: a tea bar with one till
A neighbourhood boba shop needed to sell online without running a second system behind the counter. The right answer was not the platform I know best.
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Making a large codebase legible to AI
Generated code was plausible and wrong in the same ways every time. The fix was not a better prompt - it was giving the model the same context a new developer gets.
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One component library, several products
A shared core repository across a hosting dashboard and the tools around it - what belongs in it, what does not, and the review habits that keep it from rotting.
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Sections a merchandiser can actually drive
Building a Shopify theme for thirty markets means the theme editor is the product. What to expose, what to hard-code, and why the demo matters more than the code.
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A site health dashboard executives actually open
An internal app showing real-time storefront health and the state of every third-party integration - built for people who will give it fifteen seconds.
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Theme deploys that do not need a developer awake
A GitHub Actions workflow that watches the live Shopify theme, detects what merchandisers changed, and opens a pull request - so a team twelve hours away can ship without waiting.
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React inside an application you are not allowed to rewrite
Adding modern components to a mature Ember platform, screen by screen, without a migration project - and what that constraint teaches you about component boundaries.
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From an F to a B: a Shopify performance programme that stuck
How a storefront went from a GTmetrix F to a B - WebP, lazy loading, load-on-demand, and the part nobody talks about: getting the team to keep it there.
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Checkout extensibility: less rope, fewer ways to hang yourself
Moving checkout customisation from a Liquid file you could do anything in, to an extension surface that says no a lot. Why the smaller surface is the point.
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Tips: How i can speed up build landing page
How reusable sections, conditional settings, and structure sped up two landing pages and five PDP sections in 24 hours.