What makes an app successful? How to come up with ideas? How to validate them? How about ongoing work? That and more is what we're talking about today. :-)

Pipedream - The Shopify Bulk Operations API is a special job running API. It allows you to perform huge data queries via GraphQL without being limited by pagination.However, the more difficult part of using this API is that you have to poll Shopify to ask for the current status of the job. This is because a job could take several minutes or even longer, depending on the amount of data you're asking for. Thanks to the new $.flow.rerun in Node.js code steps, you can now poll Bulk Operations in the same workflow invocation.

One of the most seemingly contentious questions in web accessibility is whether or a button or link should be used when creating certain kinds of interactive elements. Why is it so contentious? The question has been answered countless times over the years by accessibility experts. There is also a wealth of reference documentation that answers the question. The answer is straightforward, and I think it's only contentious when there is lack of consideration of why links and buttons both look different and behave in completely different ways.

You may have order attributes on your Shopify orders, which have been added during the order process or afterwards using an app to let you staff add them in the admin area. Common uses are for delivery dates, wrapping options or status information beyond the standard Shopify ones. Once the customer has selected them, it can be useful to display these afterwards to remind your customers. This can be reassuring that they selected the correct options and save unnecessary support calls or emails to check.

Shopify comes with a pretty good file storage solution, as documented on their help center, you can upload, manage, and delete files from the Files page in Shopify. All files uploaded to Shopify end up here, this means all product images, collections images and images uploaded via Theme/Section settings. I figured out a way to bulk-download these files, it involves scraping the client-side admin UI code via the browser development tools Javascript console then using a Node.js script to download the files to your local machine.

Shopify has a defined URL structure, for example, all product URLs include /products/. If you’re used to having complete control over your URL structure, this can feel quite restrictive at first. I tend to quite like working within constraints and the consistent and immutable nature of the URL structure can be a benefit.

Did you move your Shopify app off of Heroku due to the recent changes? Check out this thread on Hacker News to get some insights on how others have adapted.

At work, I have been wrapping my head around Shopify Functions. I don’t want to get too much into the business pitch, but Shopify Functions boil down to Shopify running your code on their servers, tightly integrated with the rest of their business logic. This allows developers to deeply customize Shopify, even in performance-critical sections of the pipeline. In ecommerce, both security and performance are paramount, so WebAssembly - bringing predictable performance and a strong sandbox - makes sense as the fundamental piece of technology.

Alongside performance and usability, you should always focus on security when creating any web application. Keep in mind that hacking techniques are constantly evolving, just as fast as technology is. So you must know how to secure your users and their data. This article will show you how to create a secure Rails application. The framework is known to be secure by default, but the default configuration is not enough to let you sleep well at night.

A basic cheatsheet to the usage of var — let — const in Javascript. Something we all need from time to time.