Free in open beta · 112 lessons live · new every week
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.
Day 01 · 9:14am
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.
Sarah Chen
· Lead Developerto: you
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
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
┄┄
A real task from someone on the team: what's broken, what they need, by when. Your job is to make it green.
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
┄┄
A real Liquid editor against a real Shopify object model. The same filters, tags, and patterns you'd ship to a production store.
Step 03
┄┄
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
Step 04
┄┄
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
Production themes never hardcode product data.
Built for 2026
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.
By hand, first. It's the only way to build the instinct for what 'correct' actually looks like.
Then read the AI's version of the same task and catch what it quietly got wrong, before production does.
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
01
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
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
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
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
Liquid syntax, the file structure, the object model basics. By Friday you know where every file lives in a Horizon theme.
Module 02
~ 2–3 weeks
The Shopify object model — products, variants, collections, customers, cart. Ship your first non-trivial change.
Module 03
~ 2–3 weeks
How Horizon themes are actually built. Layouts, templates, sections, blocks, snippets, settings, locales.
Module 04
~ 2–3 weeks
Own a real project end-to-end. The new collection page redesign is yours from Figma to production.
Module 05
~ 2–3 weeks
Subscriptions, wholesale app blocks, metafield-driven recommendations. The work gets ambitious; reviews get rarer.
Module 06
~ 6 weeks
From new hire to lead developer. CLI workflow, performance, accessibility, SEO, deployment.
End state: a real Horizon storefront in your portfolio.
Who you'll work with
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
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.
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?"
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."
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."
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."
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."
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
FAQ
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Tuesday, 9:14am
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
