Daring is what sets us apart.

And this time, we’ve taken the plunge with Spain’s first Shopify developer hackathon. Twice.

Gonzalo Torres, Country Lead Spain at Shopify: ‘In the history of technology, there are waves, and Shopify is riding its wave right now on a global level’.

“This is Shopify’s first hackathon initiative in Spain. You can say you’ve been part of Shopify’s first ‘garage’ hackathon”.

Two Cities. One Goal

On March 12th and 14th, in Barcelona and Madrid respectively, we took the bull by the horns and organized two events in collaboration with Shopify.

Alongside our streaming partners Óscar Recio and Cristian Sanclemente, we selected two meeting points for developers from across the peninsula, providing them with an environment to test their skills and knowledge by designing innovative eCommerce solutions within Shopify’s Open Source ecosystem.

Oscar Recio, eCommerce Evangelist & Lead Architect at interactiv4: ‘The reason behind all this is to promote collaboration in the open-source community of the Shopify platform, encouraging people to help each other (‘I have a problem, I’m looking for a solution’)’.

During the event presentations, we had the pleasure of hearing from Ignacio Riesco, CEO of interactiv4, Gonzalo Torres, Blas Segarra, Marc Lerma, Sara N-Marandi, and Tejas Mehta, all from Shopify, and Rafa Martínez from Reskyt. Some even dared to share their knowledge through live interviews on Twitch.

Following that, Cristian and Óscar provided guidelines hosted in a backlog with ideas for creating Shopify apps on Github. Creativity was encouraged at all times, with them available to assist anyone in need. The main objective was to grow the open-source community of the eCommerce platform.

Cristian Sanclemente, Solutions Architect at interactiv4: ‘Building a community around such a closed product is wonderful, motivating, and drives us to continue building something great’.

Streaming, Networking & #Happycoding

It was a spectacle to witness teams forming out of thin air, leading to spontaneous collaboration among developers from different companies, fostering networking opportunities while developing Shopify eCommerce-related apps using the platform’s open-source solutions.

Over 50 attendees in two days

More than 1,000 views on Twitch

Merchandising

Plenty of know-how

And coing, coding, coding

The events concluded with team presentations of their creations followed by voting in the Twitch chat. The hosts delivered the final verdict based on criteria of creativity and functionality. Winners received a selection of merchandise from the event’s collaborators (Shopify, Reskyt, oct8ne, and JetBrains).

With the promise of future editions of #COH, both days came to a close, eagerly awaiting to reopen very soon.

Bonus Track

OsClick, The “Garage” of eCommerce

One of the things that defines a good professional is the ability to explain and help others improve. Sharing knowledge is growing, for both the disseminator and the recipient.

That’s what this crazy adventure that Oscar and Cristian embarked on is all about. And here’s the reason behind all this commotion, this time talking about Shopify.

Ignacio Riesco, CEO of interactiv4: ‘Many times, when there are presentations of apis, new features and everything that Shopy has been incorporating in the last two years, we don’t see a direct relationship anywhere with a normal use case, we have to make a living, and I think one of the great things that are happening here is that directly with all that Shopify has, what is being set up, with all the news being launched in recent events, you are able to explain an application, and not only that, but you program it live‘.

Óscar Recio, eCommerce Evangelist & Lead Architect and Cristian Sanclemente, Solutions Architect at interactiv4: ‘That’s the idea (of the Twitch channel), that everyone who arrives at any eCommerce platform sees what the processes are, the problems we encounter, how we think about things so that there’s a real use case.

Our idea is to create real projects and use cases, for people to see and enjoy.

(This channel is) for all the new developers who decide to specialize in eCommerce. This way, we’ll work with different platforms and they’ll be able to find all the documentation, create a community, see how others create and share their knowledge.

For example, Shopify presents everything it builds and launches at recent events, but they don’t provide any use cases, and in OSclick we do it live on Twitch (links to youtube of use cases). With all the documentation provided by Shopify, we can see how to work the code and get things done‘.