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In Vancouver Next Week for HackVAN

Vancouver

HackVAN and Shopify

I’ll be in “Vangroovy” next week! My fellow Shopifolk, David Underwood, and I will be there to meet up with Vancouver developers, designers and entrepreneurs to talk about Shopify, ecommerce and “the industry” in general, catch up with some people at the Grow Conference and to participate in HackVAN, HackDays.ca’s hack day taking place in Vancouver.

Here are the quick event details:

  • What: HackVAN, a “hack day” run by the cross-country event known as HackDays
  • When: Saturday, August 20th, from 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. Pacific
  • Where: Mozilla Vancouver (163 West Hastings Street, Suite 200)
  • How much: There’s a registration fee of $10, which helps cover breakfast and lunch
  • What’s in it for you? Prizes! Really nice prizes, too!

Want to find out more about HackVAN?

If you’re in Vancouver and can do even a little programming, you should be at HackVAN!

 

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Forever Alone

Slide: 'I'm the lone javaScript developer in a sea of Rubyists / Although I don't like pigeonholing developers.'

Judging from this slide from a recent presentation of his, Nick Small, Shopify’s resident JavaScript guy and the guy behind the batman.js framework, needs a hug. Give him a virtual one on his Twitter page!

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

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Fixing Shopify’s Internet Access with a Potato

Potato screencap

Pictured above: Screencap of the Potato admin panel.

I had only one real complaint when I started working at Shopify’s office: the internet connectivity wasn’t all that great. For the longest time, you could easily fit the entire company into a van, but since late last year, the company had grown from 30 to almost 70 Shopifolks. The once-adequate service, made up of some bonded DSL lines, was no longer up to the task.

The additional people meant that we were going to switch offices soon, which ruled out signing up for different lines, whether cable, fibre, or what-have-you. By the time whatever telco we’d go with had secured the permits, ripped up the sidewalk and done the installation, we’d be in a different office. The solution had to be a combination of both workable and temporary.

Enter “Potato”. It’s the solution created by one of our guys, Adrian Irving-Beer, and it uses a PC running Debian to bond together 6 lines and load-balance them. The internet connectivity is so much better now.  I’ll leave it to Adrian to explain how it works, which he does quite well in an article in the Shopify Technology Blog titled How a Potato Saved Shopify’s Internet.

The source is strong in this one

Better still, you too can use Potato to solve your bandwidth problems. Adrian’s posted the source and config files on Github. Enjoy!

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The Shopify Template Designer’s Cheat Sheet

Cheat sheet 1

Mark Dunkley is one of the designers here at Shopify, and he’s not just good, he’s fast. When we needed a theme for the Angry Birds store cranked out it short order, he did just that — and it looks great, too!

One of the secrets of his speed is having documentation for template at the ready, and now you can have it too. Take a look at his online cheat sheet, which covers the settings, keywords and variables you need to know to do Shopify shop design. Everything’s laid out in front of you and nicely organized on the page, and to get more details, you just have to click:

Cheat sheet 2

If you design Shopify templates, you’re going to want to bookmark the cheat sheet. Check it out now!

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

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Skida and Corinne Prevot: Powered by Shopify

Skida

Skida is 20-year-old Corinne Prevot’s company that sells hats, bandanas and neckwarmers aimed at skiers, and it’s a Shopify shop. She started selling hats when she was 17, carrying her inventory to her local sports shop, without any idea of what to charge. Three years later, she’s got a profitable company that made $100,000 in sales in the last 12 months (almost half of which was profit), she’s selling hats in 47 brick-and-mortar shops across the U.S. and she’s also moving her stuff online with Shopify (click here to visit her online store).

Just as “write what you know” is popular advice from many writing schools, “sell what you know” seems to be the lesson from Corinne’s example. An avid skier, she switched from downhill to cross-country skiing while in high school at a “skiing-focused boarding school” (why did I not know about the existence of such things?). Downhill skiing has all sorts of fashion options (perhaps only snowboarding, the superior sport IMHO, gives you even more), but Corinne noted that cross-country skiers had only “kind of black and knitted” stuff to choose from. That might’ve been an acceptable choice for a Montrealer, but Corinne “wanted something more interesting”. And thus Skida was born.

Here’s Corinne in a quick video interview for Forbes; her story also appears online in an article titled All-Star Student Entrepreneurs: Hat Trick. The article is one of a series covering students who are attending school full-time and running businesses making six figures; they were invited to a special summit hosted by Michael Dell, “the original dorm room entrepreneur”.

As always, if you’d like to find out more about Shopify, you know who to call.

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My Unicorn Quest at Shopify

Unicorn shield

After reading my article about Unicorn, Shopify’s achievements system, people have asked me what my particular quest is. I’ve decided to go with a tough one — one with these particular qualities:

  • It’s incredibly important to the business
  • It serves a serious technical need
  • I have have a specific and hard-to-come-by set of skills suited to the task
  • Nobody else wants to do it.

“What is that quest?” you might ask. Simple:

Rewrite all the docs
Adapted from “This is Why I’ll Never be an Adult” at Allie’s blog, “Hyperbole and a Half”.

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

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The War Between Developers, Designers and Project Managers

The war’s been escalated: Richard Walker has a graphic that adds QA to the mix!

The War Between Developers, Designers and Project Managers: A grid of photographs showing how each sees the others.

It’s funny because it’s true. Apparently this graphic was first done in French and then translated by Alex Toulemonde.

For something similar, check out an earlier entry of mine: How Fanboys See Operating Systems.