Newsletter #64: Summer Editions, winning at life, and Midjourney

Hi there,

I hope you’re feeling good.

I was going to write “Wow, May, what a month!” but now June is gone too. Is it just me, or 2025 is accelerating? I just saw a tweet from the famous account @year_progress saying that 2025 is 50% complete, and I screamed a little. It doesn’t feel that far away that I was spending the Christmas holidays with my family, thinking about what the new year would bring and manifesting my hopes and intentions.

A blink of an eye later, it’s July 10th, and I’m planning my 30th birthday on July 27th. The big three zero. A new decade. “The thirties are so much better than the twenties” everyone keeps telling me. I trust them.

In today's edition, we’re discussing Summer Editions, winning at life, and Midjourney.

Let's dive in.

Work

I published my last edition on May 21st, the day of Shopify Summer Editions 2025. As always, Editions was a big day for the ecosystem.

Lots of exciting features were officially announced and showcased: AI block generation in themes, Region Markets, multi-entities, multi-currency payouts, Markets for B2B, Tap to Pay on mobile, and many more. In parallel, Sidekick is getting even more powerful. It now speaks 20 languages and supports voice chat and screen sharing.

If I had to choose, I would say that my favorite update is the launch of Shopify’s new flagship theme, Horizon.

I was very lucky to be able to play with Horizon before it launched. I was amazed at its capabilities. I built a fresh new store based on some Figma designs, and I could see how much faster my build experience in the Theme Customizer was compared to if I had started with Dawn.

I enjoyed being able to group blocks, experiment with very cool sections such as the Collection Links Spotlight, and change the store’s layout extensively without writing a single line of code.

Horizon and its 9 sibling themes (Atelier, Dwell, Fabric, Heritage, Pitch, Ritual, Savor, Tinker, and Vessel) are great additions to the Theme Store. And some merchants jumped on it fast. As early as June 2nd, the Canadian cookie brand Félix and Norton was already live with Horizon!

A few days after Summer Editions, on May 25th, I boarded a plane to Toronto for the Shopify Summit. Just like last year, our whole company gathered for a week to attend conferences, participate in workshops, hack, and have fun together. I had a great time! Some nights, like the Steve Aoki concert, will live in my memory forever.

Finally, on May 30th, there was Shopify.dev, the event dedicated to the Shopify ecosystem. I got to reconnect with freelancers, app developers, theme developers, and agency owners from all around the world. I had fun chatting with Axel Bouaziz from Maestrooo, Taylor Page, Karl Meisterheim, John Speed, Mat De Sousa, Kalen Jordan, Keir Whitaker, Andrew Cargill, Emili Horncastle, Thom Knepper, Spencer Bonthoux, and many more. What a special day!

Inspire

If you spend some time in the Shopify developer community on Twitter or LinkedIn, it can be very motivating. Everyone is working on cool projects, whether it’s stores, apps, or themes. This hustle does not seem to stop. You can log on at 2am on a Sunday and still find people posting. Because of time zone differences, of course, but also because many are working around the clock on problems they love.

As much as this can be motivating, it can also have the opposite effect. This constant stream of posts can make you feel like you’re not doing enough. This isn’t unique to the Shopify ecosystem, it’s a phenomenon inherent to social media, and it has been widely studied and documented.

One way to stay on the healthy side of the hustle culture is to share equitably, meaning you don’t only share wins, but also losses and struggles. Fortunately, more and more people are doing just that. These new perspectives are closer to reality and, as a result, easier to relate to.

In that spirit, something else that helps the community stay grounded is when people share personal milestones too. It’s a delight to see Shopify developers post about their last vacation, the race they just ran, or their wedding anniversary. It’s a sweet reminder that while locked-in sprints are sometimes necessary, in the long run, balance is often where happiness lives.

Last month, Sandesh Kulai wrote a tweet I found both excellent and refreshing. Sandesh is an ex-Shopify who is now the founder and CEO of a portfolio of Shopify apps called Artos Software. He tweeted this:

What a great question! And I really like the expression “winning at life”. I encourage you to click on the tweet to go read the comments. I won’t spoil anything, I’ll just say that they’re even more refreshing than the initial tweet. It’s a sweet shot of good vibes.

Explore

Following the Shopify Summit, I took a week off to discover a city I had never been to: Montréal. I had a wonderful time exploring the culture, enjoying the sun, and just relaxing after an intense week. It was the perfect break.

On my way back to London, I had a few hours to kill at the airport. I spent half of it calling friends, and the other half doing something else I really enjoy: generating images with Midjourney.

When Midjourney launched a few years ago, I spent countless evenings playing with it. It was the first time in a long time that I felt so hooked. ChatGPT got me hooked too, but in a very different way. It quickly became part of my daily routine and now feels like second nature. But with Midjourney, it was different. It was addictive. It felt like a creative game: trying to bring to life the images I saw in my head, experimenting with new words, and describing everything as vividly as I could. I even followed people on Twitter to learn from them, see what prompts they used, and what results they got. It was all so fascinating.

Today, Midjourney is even more incredible. You can generate videos, create boards, and build personalization profiles to teach Midjourney what you like. It feels limitless. My time at the airport flew by. I could have easily missed my flight.

Here is the latest thing I generated: a T-Rex on the Champs-Élysées in Paris.

To gather everything in one place, I just created an Instagram account dedicated to my Midjourney experiments. Here is the link if you’re interested in following along!

And if you’re playing with it too, feel free to reply to this newsletter and share your work with me. I’d love to see it and chat!

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