Building https://xitter.cf/t.co/9SeoAYDUuW and Untap (wip) Staff Engineer, working on Sidekick at @shopify

Amsterdam, Netherlands
Joined December 2017
Reshaped v4 is out today 🔥 After 2 years of minor releases, we’re shipping a new major that simplifies component APIs and refreshes the visual foundation. With Storybook MCP and more production-ready examples it gives better defaults to you and your agents. Main highlights 👇
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Showing favicons for the added links ✨
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Never played the first Control, got it just because saw the patterning in the trailer and man, it was way better than I expected 😮‍💨
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Having a lot of fun building what seems to be the simplest app out there. We have tons of these but making it personal and obsessing little details instead of just one-shotting it is what makes me want to use it for my own notes. Anyone wants to give it a try in the next few weeks? dms open
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it me but it's so damn hard to do this all the time 🥲
one of the best improvements to how i communicate is to always delete "i think" from anything i write
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One week left till getting back to my routine 🥲
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Haven’t really posted about Reshaped 4.2 release since that was just before going on vacation so decided give remotion a try to generate a video for it based on the changelog. It’s actually not bad
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What would be better than remotion though is to have Claude render the app and @screenstudio record it in the Claude sandbox with all of its supported effects. Would be a 10x for app release demos imo. But I’ll give it a go on an internal Silo release too
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Can we just fast forward to the next Anthropic announcement of their personal assistant?
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Off on a break but back here to share something we’ve been working on recently. While I was focusing more on how Sidekick works/looks in the new admin, it’s been amazing to see how all teams came together and the planning it takes to migrate so much. Happy to finally this live for the merchants! ✨🙏
The next generation of commerce deserves a next-generation interface. The Shopify admin has a new look, with easier navigation across key workflows and Sidekick front and center when you need a hand.
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Long break 🇵🇹
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Started working on the web version prep for the app but also trying to balance it with some paper cut fixes. Today it's switching to edit mode when adding a new view to the menu and deleting it if the title is empty and you press Esc. There is so much you can think of for these micro shortcuts and interactions so I'm only trying to fix them when I notice I reach out for them and they're not implemented or when my friends with the app access do the same 👀
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When I was joining Shopify, Tobi’s approach to leadership was one of things that I actually enjoyed hearing about. It does have its own downsides sometimes but I’ve also been in orgs with no single person who can make these calls, separate budgets etc and teams spending years pulling in their own direction. What we have at Shopify is ultimately much better.
Yep. Except: 1. This was about important internal tools. The team was stuck in some architecture nightmare of their own doing (writing it in rails but headless, with graphql api, and a SPA react app, constantly needing frontend engineers for changes). I call this kind of thing 'cosplaying an enterprise production app'. All that complexity was in the way and using straight rails was perfect in that case. 2. I make calls like this all the time. Usually someone on the team asks me to. They see what needs to happen but don’t want to be the bad guy. I’m happy to just make the call if I agree with the premise. Saves enormous amounts of meetings and change management etc. Sometimes this is jokingly referred to as Founder-mode-as-a-service here. 3. For ten years I’ve also run an internal podcast called Context, where I revisit decisions like these and explain the reasoning so everyone can learn from them. This is helpful to give people all the variables that were considered and why this was the choice made given the information available at the time. I want to teach how to make such decisions effectively without needing me. Sunk cost fallacy is a problem. 4. Any notions that Shopify is succcessful despite of me doing this, instead of because of it, will have a hard time making their argument come together I think 😄 the part of 'two weeks later tobi learns about...' is nonsese and the pivot of that project up there happens one of the more successful examples of interventions. But getting the company to work effectively with great architecture and low technical debt baggage into the right direction is literally the job, so guilty as charged I suppose. But there are always cope stories floating around like this because they are more fun, than saying 'somehow we needed tobi to stop doing silly architecture astronautics'. I can totally see that.
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A slightly better undo / redo management for custom blocks and controls ✨
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Quick overview of the Task block which is fancy checkbox group I use for planning my tasks now. Can be inserted anywhere in my notes and I can reference the whole block later on since it's stored in a separate file
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I’m in my happiest product building place right now building an app using Reshaped. Even better because I started it in pre-agent world and all of its foundations are manually polished and tweaked to make them work in situations I couldn’t think of originally. Just great composition and stability that lets me generate more product code than ever without worrying about the low level details of ui components
having your own personal component library is insanely useful for agentic coding start with shadcn/ui. ask your agent to customize the components. they’re really good at it. then every project starts with: npx shadcn init name/repo your components. your defaults. every time.
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Shipped 15+ paper cut fixes / improvements this week. One of them is supporting resizable panels ↔️ ✨
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Should I make the task cards pop? 👀
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I have definitely underestimated the amount of shortcuts and keyboard nav handling for a markdown tool with custom blocks 😅 I think I'm at around 20+ tiny interactions while I'm finishing up the task block
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Most people I know who plan their work in any sort of a tool don't build complex kanbans with filters or personal os. We all just need a good looking and structured list of checkboxes. Something simple but better than markdown checkboxes.
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