I recently attended shopify unite 2019, a three day annual shopify conference in Toronto. As I’m currently based in Kathmandu Nepal, I travelled 23hrs of flight to attend the event. My story about how it became possible for me to attend this event is even interesting.
I started working on shopify since 2015. This platform appeared to be more efficient in terms of our working model with comparision to Magento 1.x platform that we were fully relied on those days. I started exploring more and found it efficient in so many ways including merchants choice. From that time to till now, I have worked with numerous shopify merchants and agencies to get the stores and customizations in shopify. I’m a five star rated freelancer at freelancer.com primarily focused on shopify out of the box feature development. I write blogs on tweaks and hacks on liquid templates, on app development and middleware which was discovered by developers and partners around the globe. My blog alone has 40K+ views and I have interacted with hundreds of developers and partners via comments and messaging. So, these all added up for me to get the Shopify Unite fund. This year Shopify funded 15 people like me fround around the globe and it’s my luck that I was one of them. 🙂
Picture of me all smiling at the event venue
All thanks to shopify unite fund program that helped me to get this once in a lifetime opportunity. Specially thanks to Maxine, Namra, KPMG group, Pana and everyone on the backend who were very supportive and working for me to get visa and everything ever after.
During the event, many of the app developers, agencies, developers and representatives meet and greet was one of the best part of the event. Apps which I had worked previously integrating with merchant’s store were right there, stories of agencies how they are working with merchant’s around the globe and possible opportunities ahead and interations with them helped me in realizing the global market for shopify partners like me.
The main stage keynote helped me feel more comfortable with the direction the shopify product is moving and made me excited for the opportunity ahead. With the release of all the new features, i can see the new opportunities. For some features I even started scratching about the apps right from there. Hopefully i can get those on app store pretty soon. So it’s basically alot of opportunities were right there to grab them and it made me all excited.
The vision shared by successful apps representative, the path they followed and how they are supporting large number of merchants are useful and interesting to hear. I throughly make use of the “office hour” and “developers drop” in areas to interact with shopify core developers and presenters, where i get to share different ideas and got chance to place some of my questions on api/GraphQL.
I even get to meet the founder Tobi Lütke himself 🙂
To summarize, in terms of expectation it was way beyond my expectation and gave me actionable takeaways and next steps as a shopify partner. The broad vision I get to experience meeting shopify people, shopify partners and overall event experience will live with me thoughout my career and will help me to grow in so many ways.
Cheers!!
Graduated from 
Leave a Reply