I've been building for the web since 2008. For most of that time, what I figured out went into the work and stayed there. This blog is where some of it comes out.
Who's writing
I'm Kevin, a front-end engineer in New York. For about the last eight years most of my work has been Shopify: themes and apps at an agency, and the glue between a storefront and everything behind it. My team and I also build Boost, a Shopify app for carts, bundles, upsells, and memberships.
I'm also a stay-at-home dad, so my other two titles, husband and girl dad, are full-time positions with no clock-out.
The rest of the week has a rhythm. Whenever a spare hour turns up, I tinker, lately with AI: finding things to automate and seeing where it fits into the parts of my life outside of code and work. Every night ends with tea with my wife, and my favorite is The Republic of Tea's Vanilla Almond. When there's time for a movie, I reach for action and adventure, anything Marvel or DC.
Weekends are for cooking, and that's where the over-ambitious part comes in. I cook a bit of everything, though it's often Italian or salmon. My Fujifilm X-E5 comes along on trips, family outings, and days out around New York. Street and outdoor scenes are what I shoot most right now, and a few of those frames live on the photos page.
What goes here
Notes from real work, most of them small:
- Shopify problems I ran into and how they got solved, with anything client-specific stripped out.
- AI tools on front-end work: what held up, and where the output needed a person to fix it.
- JavaScript and CSS things I figured out, some small enough to fit in a paragraph.
- Small experiments, some pulled out of this site and some built just for fun. They live on the Craft page, where you can play with them.
There's no schedule. Posts go up when they're ready.
Why write it down
Tom Critchlow has a name for this kind of site: small b blogging, writing for a handful of people who care about the same things instead of chasing an audience. That's the size I'm aiming for.
Derek Sivers wrote a short essay called Obvious to you. Amazing to others. His point is that the things you think are too basic to share are often exactly what someone else is missing. That's the bet behind a lot of the Shopify posts that will land here.
Say hello
The RSS feed is the easiest way to follow along, and my inbox is open at hello@kevthecoder.xyz. If there's something you'd want me to write about first, tell me. I read everything that lands there.