Shopify · Software Engineer Intern · Jan – Apr 2025
At Shopify I was on the Creative team. We were part of the branding team, the people behind things like Shopify x MrBeast and the Black Friday globe, and most of our engineers were design engineers who build those polished one-off sites. I'll admit I was a little disappointed at first, since I'd been hoping for backend work, but there turned out to be a lot to learn.
My project was rebuilding shopify.vc, the site for Shopify Ventures. The original was built by an agency and had piled up a lot of technical debt, so we started from scratch on Hydrogen.
The fun part was the ASCII art. The old site faked it with a stack of images, so I wrote a renderer that turns any image into ASCII on a canvas. The spinning globe ended up being about 20kb of JavaScript and one small image. No three.js! I also moved the content onto the Storefront API, so the Ventures team can update it without asking a developer.
Getting to own a whole site as an intern was a big deal for me. It taught me to get comfortable not knowing everything right away, and to soak up as much as I could. It's also pretty cool to see my work live!