I'm so stoked to finally attend dotdev in person. I came to Shopify sideways. I started as a commercial photographer and retail associate at Division Road, Inc. in 2019, was running the storefront within a year, and was promoted to Director of E-Commerce during Covid after moving all inventory and operations from Seattle, WA to Scottsville, VA.
I learned to service our 2015 Timber theme and grew the store one component at a time when Online Store 2.0 was introduced. I left DR at the end of 2022 to focus on my family and started my small Shopify studio, Mimetic Themes. DR was my first client as I migrated the entire theme to a custom Dawn fork.
That's still the work: theme builds and rebuilds, custom data modeling, and embedded apps for merchants with bespoke needs. Both products below came out of that work. They're problems I kept hitting on client projects and got tired of solving twice.
I'll be capturing all things Toronto and dotdev all week. Photos below, updated nightly.
An embedded app for the work around the store: projects, jobs, and the decisions behind them, living in the admin next to the orders and products they're actually about. Agency collaborators get scoped access to the projects they're on, so the handoff doesn't end as a Notion doc nobody reopens. Built on the premise that a store's real operating knowledge shouldn't live outside the tool the team already has open.
A PJAX layer for Liquid themes: intercept the click, swap the content, skip the reload. You get the feel of a single page app without going headless. The swap is the easy part. The hard part is everything downstream that assumed a page load, so it ships with an analytics bridge that keeps Customer Events, GA4, and pixels firing correctly on virtual pageviews. Running in production on a client store, with an agent skill that audits a theme and adapts it.
View live example at yatseen.com