I’ve been working on Shopify Apps full-time since 2021 and I’m the founder of Ablestar and Altera. Prior to that I worked as a data scientist at Sequoia Capital and in InfoSec at Mandiant.
I live in Spain 🇪🇸 with my family. All posts are written by me (not AI) and cover Shopify and other tech topics.
Our first Built for Shopify review was stressful. We had little idea of what to expect, just a long list of guidelines we hoped we were meeting and a lot on the line. Since then we’ve been through more than 10 BFS reviews and it feels a lot calmer. We have a better idea of what reviewers are focused on and which mistakes to avoid. Our last review took less than an hour to resolve and was approved later that same day....
Why I Built It We use Shopify’s GraphQL API a lot in our apps, and I often need to pull up a specific documentation page quickly. While Shopify’s MCP server can answer some questions, it’s slower and doesn’t always show the full context. I’ve long liked using browser shortcuts and custom search engines, so I wanted a faster way to jump straight to the page I need. Enter Raycast. Raycast is a replacement for Spotlight on macOS that lets you get things done using only your keyboard....
For whatever reason, our youngest child finds it hilarious to ask if there’s school tomorrow. He knows the days of the week and which days have school, but that doesn’t stop him from asking. For my part, I’ve always liked the idea of e-ink displays as a personal dashboard. They’re unobtrusive, don’t need frequent charging, and I enjoy tinkering with hardware. So, using his questions as an excuse, I spent some time last weekend configuring an e-ink display to definitively answer the question, “Is there school tomorrow?...
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....