Why I decided to specialize in e-commerce
Prior to landing on e-commerce, I developed many websites, played around with different tech stacks, and learning about the various industries that I could develop for. The world of e-commerce jumped out at me and pulled me in. The first few months after discovering about Shopify, I spend countless sleepless nights digging around the platform, understanding how themes worked under the hood, and searching github for what other developers were doing with it.
I would start discussions about Shopify with such passion with other developers and techies that I ended up getting my first freelance clients pretty quickly. I was so eager to share my discoveries with everyone that I talked to that I became the go to guy for any Shopify questions.
Why it was different than building other websites
What excited me about creating e-commerce websites is the fact that they were most likely going to be used, so every little detail mattered. If regular websites allow for some mistakes, e-commerce sites had to be close to perfect. Any little mistake could cost the client some major money so I had to be zoned in. It put just enough pressure on my work that it created an incredible environment to learn. We have all had to learn something that was so boring that you just can’t get it in to your head. This was different. Information just sticks.
Talent all over the world
As I took on increasingly difficult project, I started collaborating with other Shopify developers. I remember the first time I couldn’t solve a problem, I found a developer on Upwork that said he could help me. What I failed to accomplish in 10 hours, this developer was able to finish in 2. I was astonished. From that day on, I wanted to have him around. We ended up working together on countless projects and I couldn’t have been more thankful for e-meeting this amazing developer on the other side of the planet.
As a developer, having a good group of people around you is one of the best things you can do. It is impossible to know everything. And contrary to popular belief, you can’t find everything on the Stackoverflow. And even if you can, what might take you 2 hours to find, another developer might be able to give you the answer in 5 minutes (not always but happens pretty often).
Future of e-commerce
With 2020 in hindsight, online presence is taking an even bigger role in our lives. It’s becoming a bigger part of how we communicate, work, hire, share ideas, shop, and even get together with friends. The exchange of money is in many of those activities. Having a seamless experience in that exchange of money is something that I find very interesting to solve and improve.
Currently there are still too many barriers present when making a purchase. The big companies like Shopify and Amazon are trying to solve it, but there is an incredible opportunity out there for open-source software to solve this barrier.
The other barriers to online shopping is speed and user experience. This is a huge topic for another day. But this is something that is also incredibly interesting and evolving unbelievably quickly. Here are a few of the things that excite me: improving Shopify Theme speeds, working with new technologies to increase website load times (including image optimization, page caching, and various rendering techniques like server side rendering vs static site generation), and exploring Progressive Web Apps (PWAs).
