Free in open beta · 112 lessons live · new every week

Become a Shopify developer.
By getting hired.

You're hired as a junior dev at Northwind Coffee Co. Tickets land, you write Liquid in a live editor, the storefront updates as you type. And you learn the part that matters now: knowing when AI's code is wrong, and fixing it.

No signup needed. The first lessons are free, you're writing real Liquid in under a minute.

↑ A real lesson: the Module 4 slide cart · Try it yourself

It's the course Codecademy is missing. I've followed Shopify courses before and never felt I actually learned anything. This is very different.
Beta testerEarly access · professional Shopify dev

Day 01 · 9:14am

It doesn't start with a tutorial.
It starts with an email.

No "Welcome to your beginner journey." No assessment. You're hired, and a task is already waiting: fix the product page price the way production themes actually do it.

Every lesson is this shape: a task lands, you write Liquid, the preview moves, and a validator judges it like a code review. Then the next email arrives.

Inbox · Northwind Coffee CoTuesday, 9:14am
From

Sarah Chen

· Lead Developer

to: you

Welcome — first thing, fix the product page price

Hey, glad you're starting today. Coffee's in the kitchen.

Before I walk you through the rest of the codebase, I want to give you a small fix to get familiar with how product data flows through our theme. Open sections/product-information.liquid in your editor right now — the product page is hardcoded to $18.99 and we never want that in a production theme.

Render it the way you'd write it for any product on any Shopify store. The validator will tell you if the pattern's right. Ping me on Slack when it's green.

— Sarah

Lesson 1 of Module 1

Open this task →

↑ This is the first screen after signup.

How it works

The loop. Four steps.
Repeat 110 times.

Every lesson is the same shape, on purpose. The repetition trains your eye: soon you read a theme the way a senior reads a PR.

Step 01

┄┄

An email arrives

A real task from someone on the team: what's broken, what they need, by when. Your job is to make it green.

Inbox · 1 new9:14am
From

Sarah Chen · Lead

Fix the product page price

Hey, glad you're starting today. The product page is hardcoded to $18.99 — render it the way…

Lesson 1 · M1

Open task →

Step 02

┄┄

Open the editor

A real Liquid editor against a real Shopify object model. The same filters, tags, and patterns you'd ship to a production store.

sections/product-information.liquid

Step 03

┄┄

The storefront responds

As you type, the Northwind storefront re-renders: real products, real variants, real metafields. Not a stripped-down demo.

northwind-coffee.com

Single Origin

Ethiopian Yirgacheffe

$18.99

Add to cart

Step 04

┄┄

Pass the bar

A validator checks your pattern, output, and accessibility, the bar a real code review would hold. Pass, and the next email arrives.

Validator · Passed

2 attempts · 1m 47s

  • Renders product.title (not hardcoded)
  • Applies the money filter to price
  • Output matches $18.99 for current variant
  • No inline styles

Production themes never hardcode product data.

Built for 2026

AI writes the Liquid now.
Knowing when it's wrong is the job.

Writing code by hand is becoming optional. Reading it, judging it, and fixing what the AI got wrong is not. And you can't review code you couldn't have written yourself, so here you build both at once.

  1. 01Write it

    By hand, first. It's the only way to build the instinct for what 'correct' actually looks like.

  2. 02Judge it

    Then read the AI's version of the same task and catch what it quietly got wrong, before production does.

  3. 03Direct it

    Write the prompt that gets it right the first time, and debug the output when it doesn't.

Every other Shopify course teaches you to type the syntax. This one teaches you to be the developer who's still valuable once the AI does.

Why this exists

Built for the version of the job
that survives AI.

01

Not syntax. Judgment.

AI can already write {{ product.title }}. It can't spot the wrong filter shipping to a real store. The exercises train the judgment that survives the next model release.

what AI misses

{{ product.price }} → {{ product.price | money }}

02

Not lessons. Real work.

Every task arrives from a person with opinions and deadlines: Sarah in engineering, Marcus in marketing, Priya the founder. Your job is to ship anyway.

an actual ticket

Marcus: "The homepage hero needs to be more emotional."

03

Not Dawn. Horizon.

Anchored to Shopify's current Horizon architecture: theme blocks, content_for, the real section structure. The patterns agencies hire for now, not in 2019.

where lesson 1 lives

sections/product-information.liquid

What you'll build

From {{ product.title }}
to a production storefront.

Six modules to the skill stack a Shopify agency expects from a senior dev, without the years of picking it up review by review.

Module 01

~ 1 week

Your first days

Liquid syntax, the file structure, the object model basics. By Friday you know where every file lives in a Horizon theme.

  • Output, filters, tags, conditionals
  • money & date filters at production quality
  • Where every file lives in a Horizon theme
  • Reading real Horizon source confidently

Module 02

~ 2–3 weeks

Your first real PR

The Shopify object model — products, variants, collections, customers, cart. Ship your first non-trivial change.

  • product, variant, and collection objects
  • Cart logic and line item properties
  • customer.tags-driven personalization
  • Search, pagination, and sort

Module 03

~ 2–3 weeks

Architecture week

How Horizon themes are actually built. Layouts, templates, sections, blocks, snippets, settings, locales.

  • Sections, blocks, and content_for
  • Theme settings & locales
  • Custom section schemas
  • Snippet composition patterns

Module 04

~ 2–3 weeks

Big feature ship

Own a real project end-to-end. The new collection page redesign is yours from Figma to production.

  • Custom PDP and collection templates
  • Metafields and metaobjects
  • Forms, cart drawer, AJAX patterns
  • Currency & market localization

Module 05

~ 2–3 weeks

Senior dev territory

Subscriptions, wholesale app blocks, metafield-driven recommendations. The work gets ambitious; reviews get rarer.

  • Subscription app integration
  • App blocks for wholesale portals
  • Metafield-driven recommendations
  • Real-time cart with the Storefront API

Module 06

~ 6 weeks

Production responsibility

From new hire to lead developer. CLI workflow, performance, accessibility, SEO, deployment.

  • Shopify CLI + GitHub integration
  • Core Web Vitals & performance budgets
  • Accessibility to WCAG 2.2 AA
  • Capstone storefront ready to ship

End state: a real Horizon storefront in your portfolio.

Who you'll work with

Five coworkers. One job.
Six modules of real tickets.

Each NPC has a distinct voice you can recognize from the first sentence. Their requests collide with each other on purpose — that's the version of the job we're teaching you.

Sarah Chen

Lead Developer

Your throughline. Patient mentor. Gives you the why behind every task and trusts you to read the docs after.

Sample subject

"Re: that PR — can we talk about the assign vs. capture call?"

Marcus Reed

Marketing Director

Marketing director. Wants the homepage hero to be more emotional. Source of the requests that test your patience.

Sample subject

"URGENT: Hero feels flat — can we ✨ it up by EOD?"

Priya Sharma

Founder & CEO

The founder. Concise, growth-focused. When Priya files a ticket, Black Friday is on the line.

Sample subject

"BFCM landing pages — three of them, ready by the 17th"

Diego Alvarez

Operations

Ops. No flourish. Talks SKUs, ship dates, and the edge cases everyone else forgot.

Sample subject

"Inventory dashboard — need to see stock-by-vendor view"

Yuki Tanaka

Senior Designer

Senior designer. Will tell you the type weight should be 450, not 500. She is right.

Sample subject

"Figma → PDP — the buy buttons are off by 2px on tablet"

The arc

From your first day
to lead engineer.

Modules are never called "Module 1" in the product. They're career stages at Northwind — and the emotional beat of each stage is part of the design.

  1. 01 · Module 1

    Your first days

    Sarah walks you through the codebase. You fix small things, render your first product price, and learn where everything lives.

    "I just fixed a typo. I'm a developer now?"

  2. 02 · Module 2

    Your first real PR

    Marcus wants inventory status on the product cards. Delivering it means actually understanding the object model. You ship your first real change.

    "Wait — I actually shipped a change. That was me."

  3. 03 · Module 3

    Architecture week

    Priya needs three campaign landing pages. You learn how themes are really structured and build the scaffold marketing fills in.

    "Oh. Themes are made of these pieces. Now everything makes sense."

  4. 04 · Module 4

    Big feature ship

    The collection page redesign is yours from Figma to production. Multi-week project that ties modules 1 through 3 together. Sarah reviews. You own.

    "This is hard. I'm building a real thing."

  5. 05 · Module 5

    Senior dev territory

    Subscription app integration. Wholesale app blocks. A metafield-driven recommendation system. The work gets ambitious; Sarah is reviewing less and trusting more.

    "I'm doing stuff I didn't think I could do."

  6. 06 · Module 6

    Production responsibility

    A new product line launches in six weeks and you're the engineering lead. Performance, accessibility, deployment: the full ship.

    "I shipped a storefront. I could do this for a real client."

110 lessons · 5 coworkers · 1 capstone

Real work, with just enough scaffolding
to learn from it.

FAQ

The questions everyone asks.

Do I need to know Shopify already?

No. Module 1 starts with where files live in a Horizon theme — before you write a single line of Liquid. By module 2 you're shipping real product features. The only prerequisite is comfort with HTML and basic JavaScript.

Why not just learn from Shopify's docs?

Docs explain syntax. We teach judgment — when to override AI, how to architect a theme, how to review code at the bar a Shopify Partner would apply. That doesn't show up in any documentation, and it's the part that pays.

Will AI tools make this obsolete?

The opposite. As AI writes more Liquid, developers who recognize good Liquid get more valuable, not less. Every lesson explicitly covers what AI commonly gets wrong on that pattern — that's the moat, and the entire reason this exists.

What do I actually build by the end?

A complete Horizon-theme Shopify storefront — Northwind Coffee Co — that you can install into a real Shopify development store. It's a working portfolio piece you can show clients, not a certificate of completion.

How is this different from Codecademy or YouTube playlists?

Codecademy is linear and dry. Frontend Masters is lecture-heavy. YouTube is one-off tips. This is a job. Tasks arrive from coworkers. You ship, you debug, you read Yuki's design notes, you negotiate Marcus's deadlines.

Is it gamified? Are there points and badges?

No XP, no streaks, no confetti. The game-feel comes from the work itself — the email landing, the validator going green, the next email arriving. Linear/Stripe-grade restraint, not Duolingo-grade reward dispensers.

What does it cost?

Free during the open beta, every lesson, no card. When we launch, $29/mo or $290/yr, with a founder lifetime tier limited to the first 200 customers.

Stay in the loop

Get notified when v1 launches.

Three modules are complete and the rest are shipping every week, plus the paid version is on the way. Drop your email and I'll send one note when the next module lands and one when v1 goes live. Anyone on this list before launch gets early-tester pricing.

One email when a new module ships, one when v1 launches. No drip sequence, no spam. Unsubscribe anytime.

Tuesday, 9:14am

Sarah is waiting.

Open the workspace. Read the first email. Write your first line of production Liquid in the next ninety seconds.

Free in open beta · $29/mo at launch · No card to try