Biossance was the first store where I did more than pick up tickets. I did the architecture, wrote the code, and I was also the person who explained technical decisions to the stakeholders.
The team had no Shopify specialists
The team had real e-commerce experience, including my tech lead. What none of us had was Shopify. I was the closest thing to a specialist there, and I was not a senior developer yet. I made senior-level decisions because there was nobody else to make them. That is where most of what I know about architecture comes from.
I did the prototypes myself
I have always had a foot in design. I took Google’s UX Design course and studied a lot on my own, and I sketch screens before handing anything to the design team. What made that useful was knowing Shopify’s constraints. I could say which layouts were cheap to build and which ones would cost three weeks of custom work, so design reviews became a conversation about what we could actually build.
Built from scratch and wired into internal systems
The store went up from zero. That included connecting internal systems into both the Shopify backend and the storefront, which took most of the schedule. Performance came out ahead of comparable stores at the time.