Newsletter #19: building a Shopify app in 4 hours using Gadget, recreating Connect Four inside Excel and Falling or Flying

Hi there,

I hope you're feeling good.

As you’re reading these lines, I’ve taken a few days off to properly celebrate Halloween in London. Fun times!

Before I went off grid, Youness Idbakkasse and I were invited by our friend David Nizard to record a podcast about Shopify.

David is the founder of Expertify, a French Shopify agency specialized in custom development (headless, custom apps, etc.).

The three of us sat down around coffee and macarons on a beautiful Sunday afternoon. We talked about the ecosystem, building themes for the Theme Store, the use cases for choosing a headless stack, and Shopify's latest features such as functions and checkout extensibility.

I will share the podcast’s link as soon as it’s released.

Thank you David and Youness, I had a great time with you guys!

In today's edition, we're discussing building a Shopify app in 4 hours using Gadget, recreating Connect Four inside Excel and Falling or Flying.

Let's dive in.

Work

On weekends, some people choose to rest and chill, while others code relentlessly.

Gadget’s cofounders fall into the second category.

Gadget is a full-stack, serverless JavaScript platform for web app developers. Its primary objective is to handle infrastructure setup and scaling so that app developers can focus on their app’s core features and value proposition.

As part of their expansion strategy, Gadget’s founders have consistently emphasized how fast it is to build a Shopify app with Gadget.

This race against time has been a recurring theme in their YouTube videos: “Build a full-stack Shopify product tagging app in 20 minutes”, “Build a Shopify checkout UI extension to validate VAT numbers in under 20 minutes”, etc.

This weekend, they took their efforts to a new level.

On October 28th, Mohammad Hashemi and Harry Brundage, co-founders of Gadget, conducted a 4-hour live session on YouTube. During this session, they built and deployed a Shopify app that synchronizes a store's Instagram posts into metaobjects. It was an exceptionally insightful demonstration.

You can watch the live stream recording here. However, I recommend waiting for the shorter and more polished version of it, which will be available soon on Gadget’s YouTube channel.

In the coming days, Gadget’s team will submit this app as a public app on the Shopify App Store, making it accessible to everyone.

More importantly, they will provide this app as a forkable template in Gadget so that developers can use it as a starting point to build their own improved version of it.

Feel free to explore and experiment with this template. I certainly will!

Inspire

Today, I’m writing about a very special inspiration: my brother, Benjamin.

Ben is 24 year-old. He is kind, curious, smart and passionate about outdoor adventures of all kind. He loves basketball, swimming, driving sports car and exploring places he doesn’t know. We both live for discoveries.

When indoor, his quest for the unknown does not stop. He enjoys activities that heat up his brain: he is very good at poker, chess and has a knack for strategy in general.

During the past few years, Ben has been playing with Excel on his spare time, more specifically VBA (Visual Basic Applications). It started with building macros at work and it turned into an impressive set of skills allowing him to craft wonders.

It’s one of these wonders that I want to share with you today.

Ben has recreated the Connect Four game inside Excel, using VBA.

Connect Four is a two-player game. Each player chooses either yellow or red discs. Then they take turns to drop their discs into a grid. The goal is to be the first player to align 4 discs, whether it’s horizontally, vertically or diagonally. The word “first” is important: it means that whilst you’re trying to build your own row, you also need to be mindful of your opponent and block his attempts.

Ben used VBA to implement all the rules of this game and teach both attack and defense strategies to the machine.

I played his Connect Four game inside Excel many times and I really enjoyed it.

The result is impressive, to say the least. I am immensely proud of him. He did an outstanding job!

Discover more about Ben’s process to build this Connect Four game in his very first LinkedIn post.

Explore

A month ago, the unbelievably talented artist Jorja Smith released her new album, “Falling or Flying”.

My favorite song on this album is the one with the same title.

Let’s listen to it to end this week on the right note.

Enjoy.

Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for reading this edition until the end.

I'll talk to you soon.

Take good care of yourself.

Coralie