Senior Product Lead at Shopify, Ben Sehl, discusses Shopify's Hydrogen framework for headless storefronts. Topics include decoupling frontend and backend, React-based UI, Hydrogen vs. Liquid templating, and custom data handling. Also, a section on front-end styling systems and the evolution of Shopify's Hydrogen framework.
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Quick takeaways
Headless architecture separates frontend from backend for independent management.
Shopify's Hydrogen framework offers performance, flexibility, and React-based custom storefronts.
Ben Sehl discusses Hydrogen's creation, comparison with Liquid, and Shopify's developer tools evolution.
Deep dives
Hydrogen: Shopify's Open-Source Headless Framework for Custom Storefronts
Hydrogen, Shopify's React-based headless framework, empowers developers to build custom storefronts with a focus on performance and flexible UI components. Ben Sale, a senior product lead at Shopify, discusses the motivation behind creating Hydrogen and its comparison with the liquid templating language.
Engineering Background and Career Journey
Ben Sale, from a technical background, shares his journey from being off-put by classmates' proficiency to transitioning from design to tech in New York and eventually joining Shopify. His experience in design and coding led to creating custom liquid themes and contributing to Shopify's storefront developer tools.
The Evolution of Liquid Templating Language and the Creation of Shopify
Toby, Shopify's founder, introduced Liquid as a secure templating language for customizable storefronts, which evolved into the Shopify platform. Sale reflects on Shopify's foundation, including its roots in Snow Devil, Toby's initial venture. The transition to Hydrogen illustrates a shift towards headless frameworks for enhanced control and flexibility.
Future Focus on Visual Editing and Developer Experience
Sale highlights Shopify's goal of enhancing developer productivity and reducing friction in creating commerce experiences. The upcoming focus on a visual editor for Hydrogen aims to streamline collaboration between design and development teams, addressing bridging the gap in the design-developer handoff for more efficient workflows.
Continued Innovation and Future Goals for Shopify
Shopify's commitment to performance, productivity, flexibility, and integrations drives ongoing innovation. Sale emphasizes a user-centric approach, aiming to deliver the best tools and create superior commerce experiences. Hydrogen's visual editor and continuous evolution reflect Shopify's dedication to empowering developers and advancing the platform.
Reflecting on Toronto and Mario Kart Characters
Sale humorously compares various Mario Kart characters to city attributes, associating Toronto with Mario for its well-rounded nature. His character of choice, Dry Bowser, and the city comparisons shed light on his perspectives on cities and reflect his multifaceted personality, blending elements of reliability and agility.
A headless software architecture decouples the frontend, or the “head”, from the backend. This separation allows developers to manage the UI layer independently of the backend logic and data management.
Hydrogen is Shopify’s open-source headless framework for building custom storefronts. It’s React-based and is focused on performance and flexible UI components.
Ben Sehl is a Senior Product Lead at Shopify where he works on Hydrogen and the storefront developer experience. He joins the show to talk about his engineering background, the motivation for creating Hydrogen, Hydrogen versus the Liquid templating language, and much more.
Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by Shopify
Josh Goldberg is an independent full time open source developer in the TypeScript ecosystem. He works on projects that help developers write better TypeScript more easily, most notably on typescript-eslint: the tooling that enables ESLint and Prettier to run on TypeScript code. Josh regularly contributes to open source projects in the ecosystem such as ESLint and TypeScript. Josh is a Microsoft MVP for developer technologies and the author of the acclaimed Learning TypeScript (O’Reilly), a cherished resource for any developer seeking to learn TypeScript without any prior experience outside of JavaScript. Josh regularly presents talks and workshops at bootcamps, conferences, and meetups to share knowledge on TypeScript, static analysis, open source, and general frontend and web development.