How I became a Shopify developer: Wil Bunge

Welcome Wil! So did you always have an interest in computers?

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My interest in computers started right at the beginning of my career. I was finishing school and about to go to college (this is in the late 90s - so very much in the early days of the internet). 
I immediately felt drawn to it. I was intrigued by these magical “webpages” and knew this was going to have a huge impact, but certainly couldn’t have predicted how much it changed life on earth. 

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Did you study computer science in college? 

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I actually studied telecommunications engineering - but I never explored that career path. 

Instead I started reading some of the first books around coding (and I still have some of these relics laying around the house!), read up on blogs and learned everything I could about coding. 

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What did you learn? Which languages did you pick on? 

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Back then - around 2003, I was mainly learning HTML and some CSS. Javascript was very much in its infancy, and over the years I started learning about backend systems, databases and server languages. 

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And when did you make your first dollars in software development? 

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The honest truth is that in the first 5 years of my career as an engineer - I didn’t make a dollar.
I worked on a family project and made 0 money from it. I lived with my parents in Uruguay and my costs of living were low. I had a very different life than my current one with a home with my own family. 
But at the time - I didn’t have many financial pressures. I was eager to learn, and all of my hard work was driven purely by raw passion for coding and software development. 

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What was the business?

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It was an online magazine targeted for women. Certainly one of the first websites in the history of Uruguay. We didn’t have any monetization in place outside of some banner ads which rarely had any purchasers.
But on top of the publishing site, we created a completely custom eCommerce experience. Again - this was way way way before Shopify & truly an incredibly novel proposition. 

Eventually, it was time for me to move on. And I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was basically trained up to be an independent full-stack developer. And that set me on a path to take on freelance projects all the way up to now. 

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Let’s chat eCommerce. When did you start playing around with Shopify? 

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I followed Shopify since its earliest days (around 2006). 

I saw their potential, but it wasn’t until much later (closer to 2018) that my first Shopify requests started coming in. Prior to that, I was doing some eCommerce work, but it was leveraging other technologies. 

And then - the big big explosion in work came during the pandemic. Everyone wanted a Shopify site, and it’s been almost all that I do since then. 

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Outside of eCommerce: What’s interesting to you in the world of technology?

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I’m a lifelong learner. It’s one of my most important philosophies in life. And today, I’m learning lots about AI and about Decentralized Technologies / Blockchain. 

On the AI side, I’m starting to finally witness things that completely blow my mind from a technical perspective. I don’t know if you’ve seen the AI tech that completes paintings, but it’s truly astonishing (and slightly alarming at the same time!). 

And with Decentralized Tech - I’ve been reading up on papers from the likes of Vitalik Buterin from Ethereum. He writes a lot about SBTs (“Soulbound Tokens”) and about the decentralization of everything in society which I find fascinating. 

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Last question: What’s one piece of advice you might give to someone starting out in development? 

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Don’t try to do everything at once. Learning needs to happen at a certain pace, and at a certain point learning can become unproductive.
And also - just follow your instincts. To me, coding started with raw passion, and that’s the only thing that guided me in my career.  

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Wil! Thank you so much for sharing your story. A real honor to have you on the Storetasker network. 

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