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Great chat that went over
Another great chat that went over
This was a pair programming exercise with a Shopify manager from a different team. I think I misunderstood the point of this stage. My understanding was to talk through my process while explaining the code. AI tooling was allowed/encouraged; I used Claude Code. We created a tic-tac-toe game with an option for a few themes (colors and styles). The feedback was that I demonstrated great instincts and showed genuine UI engineering knowledge, but the interviewers prefer to see more hands-on craft and polish.
I thought I knocked this out of the park. The take-home was to recreate a UI from a Figma design with semantically strict HTML. There was a note in the Figma design to "add delight" if there was time. This role is for a design engineer. So, I spent a lot of time on the delight side. There were a few other nice-to-haves mentioned in the instructions, which I also implemented. The feedback was that while the capability was obviously there, it fell short on details like spacing rhythm, component sizing, and elevation.
Shopify's process was great, just a little slow. Every person I spoke with was kind and professional. I never felt like I was being taken advantage of or that my time wasn't valued. I encourage qualified individuals to apply.
