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!
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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.
Better still, you too can use Potato to solve your bandwidth problems. Adrian’s posted the source and config files on Github. Enjoy!
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:
If you design Shopify templates, you’re going to want to bookmark the cheat sheet. Check it out now!
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
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:
Adapted from “This is Why I’ll Never be an Adult” at Allie’s blog, “Hyperbole and a Half”.
The war’s been escalated: Richard Walker has a graphic that adds QA to the mix!
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.
Every couple of days, I see the image above: “Unicorn: The Journey of a Young Wizard”. At first glance, you might think that it’s some kind of online role-playing game, and you’d be partly right. In more traditional terms, it’s Shopify’s system for tracking your accomplishments, recognizing the good work of your peers and rewarding people for their contributions above and beyond their job description. It’s the Xbox Live Achievements system, but for working life.
What you’re seeing above is the upper left-hand corner of the Unicorn page. Here’s a screen capture of the whole page as it appeared this morning, with the text blurred out so as not to give away any of our internal activities to our Esteemed Competition:
Shopify is a techie-heavy company. The vast majority of the people who work here work in some sort of software development or support capacity. Even some of our designers come from computer science backgrounds. Most of us, men and women alike, are gamers of varying degrees and have played some kind of fantasy role-playing game, whether on a computer, game console or with paper and cards (in fact, as I write this in the early evening on Tuesday, August 2nd, there’s a Magic: The Gathering card draft taking place in the boardroom).
It should therefore not be a surprise that we have an online reward system like Unicorn, which uses Dungeons and Dragons terminology. Managers are mentoring wizards, non-manager types and strange rogue agents like me are young wizards and our projects are quests and you gain experience points and consequently level up for doing things. And as with Dungeons and Dragons, where experience and rewards can be shared by a questing party, Unicorn achievements can be shared by people who team up. I can also recognize the achievements of my peers by clicking on the big “thumbs up” button on any of their achievements.
If you’re wondering what these achievements are worth:
- First, there’s that sense of accomplishment. Shopify, like many geek enclaves, is a fierce meritocracy, and many of us feel what Dan Pink likes to call intrinsic motivation to kick ass at whatever it is we do. That’s why we’re the kick-assiest ecommerce company out there!
- Okay, there’s money too. There’s no harm sweetening the pot with a little extrinsic motivation. The bigger your Unicorn achievements, the bigger a cut of the Unicorn money pool — taken from company profits — you get.
Unicorn recently got a big overhaul, so I need to redefine some of my quests, as you can see from the screenshot below:
Want to find out more about Unicorn and its origins? There’s a story in Fast Company about Unicorn, with some backstory provided by Shopify’s CEO, co-founder and still-writing-code-guy Tobi Lütke. Check it out!
This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.