I’ve been working on Shopify Apps full-time since 2021 and I’m the founder of Ablestar. Prior to that I worked as a data scientist at Sequoia Capital and in InfoSec at Mandiant.
I live in Spain 🇪🇸 with my wife and three kids. This blog is mostly about the technical side of things that I find interesting.
We first started using Shopify’s GraphQL API back in 2018 to run faster inventory edits with our Ablestar Bulk Product Editor. It was our first experience with GraphQL and, needless to say, our code was a bit rough. Eventually, we got everything working, but we were manually building our GraphQL queries and missing out on key GraphQL features like schema validation. As we added more GraphQL API calls to our apps and upgraded between Shopify API versions, it became increasingly difficult to keep track of different queries and ensuring they all ran correctly....
While setting up VS Code for GraphQL development (with autocomplete and schema validation) I wanted to download a copy of Shopify’s GraphQL schema for local use. After a little searching I found get-graphql-schema which allows you to download the entire GraphQL schema to a file. As for where to download the schema from, initially it seemed like you needed to use an authenticated endpoint but I found that Shopify also makes an unauthenticated endpoint available at https://shopify....
Our Ablestar Bulk Product Editor app processes millions of products each day and is a big user of Shopify’s product APIs. When we created the app in 2016 Shopify only had a REST API for product data and so that is what we used for the app. Over time new features, like standardized product categories, were released and we support those through the GraphQL API. Still, as of the start of 2024 the majority of our app continued to use the REST APIs....
Last contentful paint (LCP) is a big pain-point for Shopify app developers seeking the Built for Shopify (BFS) badge. There’s a lot of different factors that can slow you down, it depends on real-world performance, and there’s a delay before you see the metrics. This makes it hard to iterate quickly and it can take a long time to identify and fix issues. One of our apps, the Ablestar Link Manager, is Built for Shopify....