I didn’t start in infrastructure. I started in storefronts.
For a few years my whole world was Shopify and Liquid - themes, checkout flows, payment and shipping integrations, and the unglamorous work of making an online store actually sell. I was good at it. Good enough that in 2021 I started my own company around it.
Running a Shopify business teaches you things a tutorial never will. You learn that the storefront is the easy part - the hard part is everything around it: payments that don’t fail at checkout, shipping that actually delivers, SEO that brings people in, and a brand that makes them come back.
That work paid off. One project - PetsFirst - went from a single city to 20+ cities with 15x order growth. But the more I shipped, the more I kept bumping into the same wall: the limits of what a hosted platform will let you do.
Every serious project eventually needed something Shopify couldn’t give me cleanly - a custom backend, a real database, a mobile app, a deploy pipeline. I started spending more time in Node, in databases, in servers, in the things underneath the product.
In January 2024 I sold the Shopify company. It was the right call - I’d stopped being excited about themes and started being excited about systems.
DevOps grabbed me because it’s the opposite of a storefront: invisible when it works, catastrophic when it doesn’t. CI/CD pipelines, AWS, containers, automated deploys, rollbacks - the plumbing that keeps a product alive at 3 AM without anyone touching it.
By 2025 I was CTO at Happy Pet Tech, owning both the architecture and the infrastructure of a multi-tenant SaaS running across five countries.
The surprising part: nothing was wasted. The Shopify years taught me to obsess over the user, to ship fast, and to care about the boring details that make or break a business. DevOps just moved that obsession one layer down - from the storefront to the systems that run it.
Same instinct. Different layer.