What is the target audience for Devkit?

[muchisx]

Hey all! great work on this, thank you for sharing!

I've watched/read most of the responses of the other topics and the general idea that I'm getting is that this project is aimed for devs "Building themes" but if you've been around long enough as a Shopify dev you know that 1 out of 300 Shopify Devs "Build Themes".

The rest are either "Customizing Themes" or building in other aspects of Shopify such as apps.

In my case I do all: apps, customize themes, etc... except "Build Themes" as I always been part of an agency and freelancing, not selling themes as products, more like selling services.

So, the pool of devs that actually build themes is quite small, and adoption for this is will be impacted if it's not meant for the ones that just "Customize themes" aswell, and if I understood correctly from the other answers, adoption/popularity of this project is very important for its success.

So I wanted to know before we commit to using this, what is the target audience for this project and how would this project be used by people that don't Build?

[Freelancesage]

Totally agree! While Devkit might seem geared towards theme builders, I'm wondering if it could be useful for us "customizers" too. Maybe there's a way to leverage it for efficiency hacks? On a side note, working remotely as a Shopify dev sounds pretty sweet – have you checked out any resources on how to start working from home?

[t-kelly]

Okay so I saw this question and wanted to get a fully-featured, long form answer out--but it's ultimately delaying any response so let me get something quickly with a promise to followup with an official explainer.

You and anyone developing themes for merchants are the target audience for Devkit.

To your point, our focus at Archetype is "building themes"--this is where we are the subject matter experts and have figured things out. We can do this because we're a product company with a self-serve business model. The better we make our product, the more competitive it is against the competition.

As a developer directly serving merchants, your focus is on giving the client what they want. This alone is big task in itself. Why should you also need to figure out how to build it? It's a additional cost sitting between you and your service. Ideally you have a solid starting point with most of what you need, workflows to reliably ship and maintain projects, and patterns to develop new features on top of a solid foundation.

That's what we're gunning for. We figure out the hard problems around shipping high quality themes, and y'all provide the white-glove service that makes sure merchants are getting exactly what they need for their individual business.

More to come here! Prepping a more official follow-up now that we're well on the other side of the preview launch.