> One thing: your readers will range wildly in where they can pick this up. The references help (you're marking neighbors), but the density might occlude for some what's actually pretty accessible underneath—which is just: consciousness might be what happens when a process observes itself enough times, and freedom might be what happens when you stop maintaining identity and let yourself land wherever the unknown takes you, and you're not alone in any of that.
* I've never had zero options for solving a problem. Ten years ago, I needed to build a customer login system on top of Shopify. (Like, before Shopify had one of its own.) I had enough room to do that in javascript, and it became an app called Gatekeeper. (Today's spiritual successor: Locksmith.)
* Whoever works on patterns at Shopify does a really, really good job. They think through things slowly and thoroughly, resulting in resource models that that are usually refined over time, instead of remodeled entirely. This is a good sign.
* This is a second bullet point to underscore the previous point about Shopify's pattern-making. I've been on this platform for a decade straight, and I don't deal with systemic inconsistency. I'm only here because Shopify is really, really good at patterns.
* This is a third pattern-related point to observe that Shopify usually defers solving a problem, rather than putting forward a fragile or brittle solution. (How long did it take for order editing to arrive?) By my reading, they'd rather take a while to land on and deliver a solution that will create a broader future, than more quickly deliver a solution that will limit the future.
* Yes, there are occasionally major/breaking API changes. Honestly, I love this. For me, it forces the whole system to stay engaged, and stay alive. Yes, I know the counter-arguments to this. :)
This is why I'm still here, ten years later. Yes, some things are short-term hard. But the things that are long-term important are all locked in.
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Also yeah, building and sustaining an app is work. This is part of why I made https://apps.shopify.com/mechanic. I love the Shopify platform, so, so much, and also I needed a way to solve really specific problems more quickly, and keep those solutions running more sustainably. So: platform within a platform. Lots of nested similarity here, in the way that Shopify thinks about solving problems and the way Mechanic thinks about solving problems within Shopify.
Which is not a niche I expected to be in. I made what became Gatekeeper as a one-off for a client at the time, saasified it, and threw it on the Shopify app store. I got lucky, but its success (five figures annually since then) has pretty solidly convinced me: there's value in solving your own problems and sharing the solutions. (And also that Shopify is a solid platform to work with. I love you guys.)
It exists solely for the transition - if Flickr's the only source for these photos, then (assuming you have a sufficiently hefty Dropbox account) this tool will at least get those files safely back in your hands. What you do with them afterwards is of course up to you, but this wasn't intended to solve a migration problem.
So not to overtly threadjack, but I built https://secure.fracken.com/ as a lifeline for anyone who feels the need to jump ship from Flickr - sends everything to Dropbox, first 100 photos are free, everything else is a flat USD$1/batch.