Learn your tools

I've been helping my kid learn algebra by following a course.

This week she asked for help with a part that used a graphing calculator. This was odd because even after four years of high school math and a couple of years in collage math, I never used a graphing calculator (only scientific and business calculators before moving on to spreadsheets).

For graphing we learned to do it by hand which helped me understand how to create the lines (rise over run).

But this algebra course spent time early on to go deep into using the calculator. Going into some advanced topics right away. A bit prematurely I think.

Calculators are tools. Great tools. But you have to first understand how things work before using a tool. Otherwise the tool will seem like magic, you'll never learn more, and when the tool has problems you won't be able to fix them.

Take something simple like showing an image on your Shopify store. Something that probably happens 1,000s to 1,000,000s of times per day in your store alone. If all of a sudden it stops working in your store and you don't know how HTML, HTTP, and Internet tech works then you'll have to talk to Shopify chat. Hours later and they might have given you an idea on fixing it or be told to hire someone to help.

Say you understand a bit more of that tool (Shopify). You know Shopify creates the HTML page, which includes an <img> tag that has a url to your image, and that image url is just a file on Shopify's servers. Now you can debug a variety of problems.

• Don't see the <img> tag in the HTML? Something broke that adds the image on the page. Probably a theme issue with your product template.
• See the <img> tag but the url is empty or points to your homepage and not the image url? The image file probably didn't save correctly into Shopify so you should try re-uploading it or viewing it from your admin area.
• See the <img> tag and the url looks right but opening it gives you a 404 error? Shopify hasn't saved the image properly to their CDN. Giving it a few minutes or re-uploading it should fix it.
• See the <img> tag but the url asks you to download a file? Seems what was uploaded wasn't an image file or the upload broke and corrupted the data. Try to re-upload.

Now you're never going to be able to know everything. It would be silly to expect you to know how to inspect the raw TCP packets to make sure they are all coming back from Shopify to debug a missing image. But knowing your tools even a little bit more can make it easier to understand what they are doing.

For my kid's algebra that means learning:

• what an equation represents
• how to draw a line from an equation (good old y = mx + b and it's family)
• what a point on a line represents
• what two lines intersecting actually means

For Shopify that might mean learning:

• a little bit of HTML to be able to read or create an ugly but functional webpage (especially when their content editor breaks your HTML)
• how files are hosted online
• how an Internet site is viewed by someone halfway across the world
• how payments are processed online and connect to the banking systems

One tip I learned years ago when I got started programming was:

Learn things one or two layers above and below where you work regularly

This means if your day-to-day is focused on managing product pages on Shopify, you should learn a lot about how that activity interacts with your Shopify theme:

• 1 layer up: how the product admin changes what is shown on the page
• 1 layer up: how your specific theme shows/hides data based on the product
• 2 layers up: how the product page appears to Google and search engines (i.e. text parsing)
• 2 layers up: how the product page appears on Desktop vs mobile browsers (i.e. responsive design and browser rendering)

Then down:

• 1 layer down: what general HTML code is used for each section, widget, etc and what the code means
• 1 layer down: how different settings in Theme Customizer add or remove different HTML code
• 2 layers down: what additional assets your theme loads and if you can turn them on or off (e.g. specific JavaScript libraries)
• 2 layers down: what assets and data Shopify adds to your page that you cannot remove
• 2 layers down: what different settings and layouts can cost you in speed and size

There's a lot here but you can take your time with it. Learn little bits at a time, especially if you've ran into problems in an area. Many of these skills will transfer, even if you move off of Shopify.

Tools are a great thing, especially when you're busy. Over-reliance on tools will make you dependent which will cause problems.

Eric Davis