Locksmith Spotlight: Shopify Unite Melbourne 2022

In the final days of October, after a month of travel, the Lightward Journal launch, and seeing the Lightward team in the flesh, I returned to Australia for the first ever Shopify Unite event in Melbourne! It was energising, exciting, and I left feeling so connected and happy to be here—both on the Lightward team and a part of Shopify!

I work on the Locksmith app that lives in and grows with the Shopify platform. Shopify is an ecommerce platform for businesses and entrepreneurs, including mum and pop businesses, students, massive organisations, brands, and artists. Think of it as an accessible and well-supported way to start an online store and even manage retail point of sale (POS) in brick and mortar stores. 

Shopify's mission statement is to “make commerce better for everyone, so businesses can focus on what they do best: building and selling their products.” As a Shopify partner, Locksmith is a part of that—our focus being access control for online Shopify stores. And part of the value we offer is to do that really well and reliably for everyone who uses Locksmith, so that merchants can get on with their primary focus.

Shopify Unite is an annual meetup for developers and partners to share new features for the platform as well as ideas and knowledge through presentations, workshops, office hours, and spaces to mingle and network. It was so much fun! I personally love focusing on the details of a subject or problem as well as zooming out to the full context, to the system that’s at work. To me, Unite is the many varied pieces that make up Shopify coming together to see and experience themselves—from our detailed points of focus to seeing the interconnectivity of how we are all working to support merchants, their businesses, and each other. I particularly enjoyed that this event was held in Melbourne, and I was able to meet people from all over the Asia Pacific region! A wonderful mix of people from different markets and cultures as well as local teams form Australia and New Zealand, even someone who lives down the road from me. :)

Attending Unite, I learned about new features that will help Locksmith to potentially provide some additional access control, specifically in the checkout, using Shopify’s Checkout Extensibility and Functions. Not only were the presentations informative, but the workshops and one-on-one talks with the Shopify Developers who are working on these features were as well. I also learned more about South East Asia markets, what other app developers and agencies are working on there. 

I feel incredibly connected from this event. In my experience, the overarching guidance and purpose of Shopify as a platform to make ecommerce better for everyone was really felt there. All the internal Shopify teams are talking to app and theme developers and agencies to understand their needs and issues, how they are using the tools they have now, and what can serve them better in the future. They’re sharing their knowledge and doing their best to enable everyone. I’ve even made some great personal connections from this event that I’m so grateful for!

So many people from Unite know Mechanic and Locksmith. I'm so proud to be a part of the Lightward team—for the bedrock that is Locksmith and everything that we are building on top of that. I’m excited for the future and what comes next. There’s space for us here, to grow with health and sustainability, and to build the things we want to build—to solve the problems that we can reach. There’s an incredible accumulation of knowledge and experience, and it’s being shared. Together we can create things that are high-quality, versatile, purposeful, and useful.