Resources
A running list of tools and references worth keeping in your back pocket. Not exhaustive, just things that have proven genuinely useful.
Documentation
Section titled “Documentation”Shopify Docs The official source of truth for everything from Liquid to the Admin API. Worth bookmarking the API reference section separately. You’ll be back there often.
VS Code The go-to editor for theme development. Free, fast, and has excellent extensions for Liquid syntax highlighting and formatting.
ImageOptim (macOS) / Pinga (Windows) Desktop apps for compressing images before they go anywhere near your theme. Unoptimised images are one of the most common and easily fixed performance problems on Shopify stores.
References
Section titled “References”The Unofficial Super Shopify Developer Reference Desk 3000 Created by Important Labs, this is exactly what it sounds like. A massive, brilliantly curated hub of bookmark links spanning APIs, Liquid cheat sheets, and GitHub integrations that are otherwise scattered all over the internet. Worth spending an hour with when you first come across it.
GitHub
Section titled “GitHub”Dawn Theme Repository While technically an official Shopify resource, many developers miss the real value of its GitHub page. Digging into the commit history, pull requests, and active issues of Dawn (Shopify’s reference theme) is a masterclass in modern Liquid architecture and best practices. Seeing how Shopify’s own team approaches problems is more instructive than most tutorials.