from May 6 - May 10 just a lot of Shopify stuff
Shopify
i’ve been spending most of my time familiarising myself with Shopify because of work. My tasks can generally be grouped into the following:
- Theme customisation
- Updating information (like product tags / changing HTML templates for certain pages)
- Writing tests – I’m learning to use UI-licious to automate testing of stores’ Uis
- Working with Shopify’s third party apps for doing a variety of things, like setting up logic for shipping, build-your-own-box products, etc.
I want to spend some time outside of work becoming more familiar with Liquid and the structure of Shopify themes so that I can do more complex customisation work. There’s also some really cool-looking stuff like Hydrogen (Shopify’s framework for building custom storefronts) that I want to explore. In this vein, I’ve signed up for a Udemy course to learn how to make themes (esp learning how to use the Shopify CLI, Liquid, Tailwind and also the JSON templates that themes have).
Soft skills and learning about my own preferences
One thing I’ve learnt lately is that I don’t really enjoy meetings. I’m on a contract to do about 20h of work a week, but find that meetings (standups, client meetings etc) tend to take close to 20% of that time, which is a lot of time to me. Moving forward, I’m going to try to not attend client meetings where my presence is just good to have but not actually necessary. However, since I’m new, I’m going to treat these meetings like part of the necessary learning curve to get to know clients’ usual pain points and what features they tend to need.
Coming to my own preferences – I realised that when I look for full-time dev opportuntiies, I’d prefer to work on things that have a longer time frame. Ideally, this would be a company where devs build the company’s own product as opposed to having to answer to external clients. With agency work, meetings can be last minute as unexpected problems crop up (e.g. client reports that some feature of their site is down and it’s an important) quite often. I enjoy more long-term, less urgent work that I can do asynchronously most of the time. I think that’s why I liked my undergrad research jobs so much, because it’s about chipping away at this One Project until it’s done. There also aren’t a lot of meetings or last-minute requests.
Setting boundaries
Working as a freelancer for an agency has really tested my ability to set boundaries, mostly because I have an overextended sense of responsibility. Like, when someone asks me “Can you do this by tomorrow”, I think of it as “Can I do this if I stay up late” and tend to say yes if I think it is physically possible to do it, and not so much of whether I should be exerting myself to that point where I’m up till 1 working on something.
This is an issue to do with setting boundaries, and I think it’s time for me to properly set some. I will keep myself available in the day for work, but won’t do it after 5pm because I’ve got other parts of my life to tend to. If I keep responding to people’s requests whenever they come in, it means I’m living a lot less of my life. My contract is for 4 hours a day, but quite a lot of time goes to things outside of dev work like doing time tracking, responding to colleagues etc, client meetings that aren’t always billable.
These boundaries are important because I realised that I’ve not been focusing much on my own learning and growth for things outside of stuff related to my paid work – e.g. learning data structures and algorithms, learning more about backend.
Random update: some free camp
I signed up for this -redacted tech company - Youth Camp thing that involves 2-3h classes every weekday from last Wednesday to this Friday (run by SWEs from that company), but am realising that it’s not for me. 2-3h hours every weekday on top of work is making me way more tired than I expected. I also don’t fare well with long lectures. I’ll look for this sort of thing and vet the opportunities I want to sign up for more judiciously in the future.