Dion Almaer

Software, Development, Products

Development

Agency developers are underrated

You hear about the developer who created Wordle, or who went on to found a large company, or contributed an open source project to the commons. You don’t often hear about the agency developer, and they are both important and often on their own journeys.

The Value of Agency

Agencies, and consultants, are out there helping make businesses a reality. They deliver expertise when it doesn’t exist in house. They quickly expand the workforce and when done right, leave employees better equipped for growth.

By working at multiple companies in a domain, they can bring learnings, just as employees do when they change companies as they journey through their career.

I have found that high quality agencies are true experts who have bet their business on your platform, understand your competition, and know what your users really want. They build true empathy on what it takes to be successful.

If a platform company doesn’t have programs that include agencies as a tier one cohort they are probably doing it wrong. Ask yourself:

  • Am I training the developers at agencies to have a great understanding of what my platform or product offers? If they are asked, or are given freedom to choose, what solution to build on… would they choose you?
  • Are these developers external advocates in the community? Is there a community for them to show their chops, be rewarded for their knowledge, and celebrated?
  • Does the business team at agencies understand your offering and are you supporting them so they can be an extended sales force for you?
  • Do you have agencies not only servicing customers directly, but also through self-service opportunities (e.g. building apps / extensions / themes)?

At Shopify for example, our agencies are a vital part of our ecosystem, working with us on a joint mission to be merchant obsessed as a way to improve commerce for all. As I have dived into the ecosystem I am constantly finding agencies who deeply understand commerce and our platform, and are at the heart of delivering for our merchants to make their experiences unique and high quality.

We often talk about learning the tech, and the product, but learning commerce is an important key, and agencies have a lot of that knowledge. And once you understand the domain, competition, and environment, opportunities are unlocked.

The Entrepreneurial Path

Many of the solo or small team entrepreneurial developers that I have met came from a past life working at a merchant or at agencies. That was the training ground for their knowledge.

I have seen some common patterns when getting to know our developers, including one very strong one:

“I worked at an agency working on commerce sites for $YEARS. I started to notice that several of our clients were asking for $FEATURE, so I decided that I would build a Shopify app that delivers the feature and enables any merchant the ability to unlock it!”

— Pat

This takes so much risk away from your app development. For one, you can do work for clients directly to prove things out, and this gives you a direct line to a customer with the clear need (else they wouldn’t pay!) Then by working with other merchants you can learn what needs to be customizable, and then when ready an app version unlocks scale. It’s nice to get paid decent money from a merchant to do guaranteed work, and it’s nice to get money whenever someone installs your app.

This is yet another example of the power of de-risking app development with Shopify.

Thank you agencies, and those of you working at them. You are at the heart of it all.

Others in the series:

The Shopify Entrepreneurial Developer

From Hello World to IPO

tl;dr We often talk about how Shopify supports entrepreneurs from the first day of their journey building a business all the way to huge merchants that grow to become unicorns, or go public, and are just plain successful. Now it’s time to show the role of developers in helping this growth, but also how our developers themselves can grow from sustainable businesses to having their own IPOs.

When I joined Shopify, I wanted to understand what was unique about the platform and ecosystem, and the role that developers play. Shopify is merchant obsessed, so it was important to understand the role of merchants.

Supporting the merchant journey

I was very excited at the long tail opportunity, and how we deeply care about helping someone from their idea around commerce all the way to becoming a huge merchant. In a general sense, you can see how the life cycle progresses, and how developers come into that journey.

  • Have an idea? To get started it’s as simple as creating your store on Shopify
  • There is a world of configuration available to you, and with free themes and apps available you can make your store yours
  • Once you make some sales and prove to yourself that this is working you can then decide to invest more. This ability to delay capital expenditures is really important, and can allow you to try a few things without the cost of each shot.
    • You can look at paid themes
    • You can outsource development to the app store and install apps that work for you from the ecosystem
  • Now your sales have gone from strength to strength, you can once again invest more:
    • Hire an agency that can help you really customize to your needs, building your own apps and themes
    • It may be time to hire an in house developer
  • As your needs for customization grow, you may find yourself wanting to build some headless commerce experiences, with your developers looking into Hydrogen and other options

You have as much as possible out of the box, and in the ecosystem, and you have room to expand along with your business. This is exciting, especially when you compare wanting to build an app and having to put $10k or more to get an MVP… and you have no idea of the returns.

It’s vital that we allow entrepreneurs to do more with less, helping them to prioritize both time and money.

Developers scale

If you look at the developers role in the life cycle above, you see how they help the entire ecosystem scale.

The core Shopify platform will always be looking to enable the core functionality that all merchants need.

It is also true that the platform itself will never be able to offer all of the customizations that merchants need. We won’t be experts in every niche that is “commerce”. Even if we were, the admin UI would grow to be unwieldy and infinite. At our heart we want merchants to be able to be creative, innovative and unique. We understand they need to differentiate. We understand that they want to build long term relationships with their customers. It is through this legion of commerce that we all differentiate from the large online silos that offer relatively similar transactional experiences.

This is where the entrepreneurial developer comes in.

You can find a niche that serves many merchants. It may not make sense for an individual merchant to build certain functionality as the cost doesn’t warrant the LTV boost. However, this is where the power of aggregation comes in. An entrepreneurial developer can build that functionality and sell it to many merchants, and now the math works out for everyone.

For example, a developer can build the functionality that allows you to point your phone at your feet, and you see what they look like with those socks or shoes on. Just like that, every merchant who sells footwear can get that functionality.

There are so many opportunities to come in and solve problems for merchants. You can target types of commerce, experiences and their brand, integrations, helping with conversion, helping them understand their business, making commerce more enjoyable and fun, and so much more.

Here are some exemplars, from solo founders to small teams who are at various stages of growth.

It’s a perfect time to become a Shopify Developer. You can build a business quickly, and with the growth that we are seeing, Harley won’t just be tweeting about the brands that are IPO’ing, it will be time to showcase you, the developers. Can you tell I’m excited?

/fin

The Order of the JSON

When I read Fitz’ tweet about ordered JSON my body shuddered, as my brain was flooded with a past experience that taught me a frightening lesson on technology being used by non-technical companies.

It was a moment that had me wonder:

  • How does world not break due to technology more often
  • How much time and money is wasted due to some ignorance at some part of the development cycle?

Ok, here goes. My frightening tale around the order of the JSON. I was working on a project for a large Fortune 500 (I will protect the name of the company to protect the innocent!).

The project at hand required integrating a modern front end (mobile apps and web) with a legacy system. This isn’t legacy in a “the engineering team really wants to rewrite it in the new shiny”, but in a “there is COBOL running back there somewhere isn’t there” kinda way.

Much of the system was so old that it was hard to find anyone who knew how it actually worked, and it’s maintenance had been outsourced to some of the typical IT outsourcing companies of the time.

At first all was well. We had created mock services that spoke the protocol and we were building against it. We were dealing with pretty simple REST calls with JSON, so it wasn’t like we were all SOAP-y.

We wanted to integrate with the real systems as soon as they were ready of course, and that’s when it got fun. I remember the first time we spoke to the system an got a terse error message:

ERROR 1000294

That was it. No more info. We asked the service folks for more context, and *two weeks later* we were told “Oh, the JSON payload that you sent us was in the wrong order“.

Huh? Why would you care what order we were sending the name value pairs for this?

We asked if they could fix this and be more flexible. They said they would get back to us.

It turned out their did a “LOE analysis” (level of effort, in case you haven’t had the privilege), and came back to tell us that they would fix it, but it would take 9 people 6 months to do complete. With a straight face. In a way that signalled that this is the cost of doing business and it happens all the time.

We couldn’t wait that long, and we thought about creating a custom emitter that would indeed order the JSON. We wouldn’t want to do it on the client, as what if something changed? We didn’t have faith that this “order” would be set in stone forever.

Ok, let’s handle it on the server then…. and have continuous testing to make sure that if anything changed we would know right away. Not the end of the world I guess.
But it still didn’t feel right. I got on a plane to visit the site where this was all going down.

I mentioned that it was hard to find people who knew how these systems worked. I have previously mentioned how QA engineers are underrated and they came to my aide again here. I hunted down the QA lead and he took me on a tour of how he tests the systems.

I got to learn that we were talking to a service running IBM DataPower Gateway which sat on top of WebSphere which sat on top of the COBOL.

He was showing me the DataPower GUI, and let me play around with it. After awhile of drilling around and going through settings I got to a hidden advanced setting that was a checkbox asking:

Validate order of JSON? [X]

I unchecked it. Ran a client to post the JSON to that instance. It worked just fine.

And, then I sat back and contemplated how this type of event was probably occurring daily, all over the world, and some consulting companies were getting millions of dollars.

Finally, I was so curious about where the root of this came from, and did a search for ordered JSON and ended up on this IBM javadoc.

Of course! I am sure you have never run into scenarios like this in you time in tech, have you?

The right thing to do, is the right thing to do.