First store where I was more than a developer picking up tickets. I did the architecture, wrote the code, and ended up being the one translating technical decisions for stakeholders. Nobody made that official. It just happened, and then it kept happening.
Nobody on the team knew Shopify
The team had real e-commerce experience, my tech lead included. What none of us had was Shopify specifically, and I was the closest thing to it.
I wasn’t a senior developer yet, and I still ended up carrying senior-level decisions, because there was nobody else to ask. That’s where most of my architecture instincts actually come from. Not from a course. From being the only person in the room who could answer certain questions, and having to be right about it.
I did the prototypes myself
I’ve always had a foot in design: a Google UX Design course, a lot of self-study, and the habit of sketching screens before handing anything over to the design team.
The sketching wasn’t the useful part. Knowing Shopify’s constraints was. I could tell which layouts were basically free and which ones would cost three weeks of custom work, so design reviews turned into a conversation about what we could actually build instead of a wishlist thrown over the wall.
Built from scratch, wired into what already existed
The store went up from zero, including plugging internal systems into both the Shopify backend and the storefront. That’s the plumbing nobody puts in a portfolio, and it ate most of the schedule.
Performance came out well ahead of comparable stores at the time.
Most of the roles I’ve had since are some version of this one: sit between what the business wants and what the platform can actually do, and get the two to agree.