Why I Stopped Writing (And What Made Me Start Again)

I stopped writing for a couple of months. No blog posts, no LinkedIn updates, nothing.

It wasn't because I had nothing going on. I was working, learning, building things. But every time I thought about posting, I'd scroll through my feed and see people announcing their offers from MAANG companies, getting placed at top-tier startups, sharing wins that felt way bigger than anything I had.

I was on a different path — not chasing big tech, but building my skills in eCommerce and Shopify development. And for some reason, that felt like it wasn't worth talking about.

What Actually Changed

Two months ago, I joined a web agency called Wings as a Senior Shopify Developer.

This is the job I always wanted.

For years, I kept upskilling on my own — learned React, Node.js, MongoDB, built full-stack projects, created a portfolio. But none of it was being used in my actual work. I was a developer who coded on the side, not someone solving real problems for real clients.

Now I'm finally doing that. Building frontend components from scratch, working with designers, shipping code that goes live. It's not a MAANG job. It's not even a product company. But it's development work that excites me.

And that shift made me realise something: you don't need impressive company names to have experiences worth sharing.

What Agency Work Actually Looks Like

Before Wings, I worked at SPR Sports Impex as a Technical eCommerce Developer. I also ran my own startup for a few years. In both cases, I built Shopify websites — but I relied heavily on pre-built themes and templates.

Agency work is different.

Clients come with specific designs. Our designers reference multiple sources to create something unique. You can't just buy a theme from the marketplace and call it done. There's no plugin that solves the exact problem you're facing.

So you build. Component by component.

That meant I had to properly learn Shopify Liquid — not just copy-paste snippets, but actually understand how sections, blocks, and schema work together. My full-stack background helped with vanilla CSS and JavaScript, but Liquid was new territory.

This is what tutorials don't teach you: how to build things as you go, when there's no template to fall back on.

Mistakes I'm Already Making

I'm two months in, and I've already run into problems I didn't anticipate.

One example: working with Shopify's default themes like Dawn or Horizon seems easier at first. The structure is there, the components exist. But these themes come with their own base.css — typography, colors, spacing, all pre-defined.

When your client's design uses completely different styling, you end up fighting the theme's defaults. You start adding !important everywhere. The CSS becomes messy. What looked like a shortcut turns into a maintenance headache.

I'm learning that sometimes starting from scratch is cleaner than trying to bend an existing theme to your needs.

I'll be sharing more of these lessons as I go. I have a running list of things I've gotten wrong — just need to organise my thoughts.

What I'm Planning to Share

Going forward, I want to post about:

• What I'm learning while building custom Shopify themes

• Mistakes I make and how I fix them

• How agency development actually works day-to-day

This isn't going to be polished advice from someone who has it all figured out. It's more like notes from the field — things I'm discovering while doing the work.

If you're a frontend developer or getting into Shopify, maybe some of this will be useful. Or at least relatable.

I stopped posting because I thought my work wasn't good enough to talk about. Turns out, the messy middle is exactly what's worth documenting.