Today, we’re highlighting one of our newest software engineers, Steve Jones, to learn more about what he does at Loop, and how he’s supporting Shopify’s Hydrogen project.

Steve was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois before attending Lawrence University where he received his bachelor’s in biology and philosophy. One day, he decided it was time to jump into a coding bootcamp. “It was a profound, life changing experience,” he said. He currently still resides in Chicago, and it’s his fourth week here at Loop!

The following is a transcript of an interview by JP Arnaud-Marquez, Loop’s principal content marketing manager. Some of the questions have been edited for brevity and clarity.

What does a day in your life look like at Loop? What’s exciting about working here?

Since I’m new here, it’s a lot of learning. I’m getting accustomed to a new, much larger code base than I’m used to. We also do a bit of pair programming, which is a great part of my day to day. 

There’s a lot of reasons why I’m excited about working here, but one of the top reasons is our culture. People are serious about living our company values, and they’re excited about what we’re building. There’s a palpable enthusiasm for our product and we all work together to make merchants successful, and each other.

What is Shopify’s Hydrogen project? How are you involved?

Hydrogen is a React-based framework that provides increased storefront customization capabilities for Shopify merchants. Our goal is to integrate seamlessly within this framework, so for the last few weeks we’ve worked on delivering a software development kit (SDK) to integrate On-Store into the Hydrogen framework. We are essentially repackaging or rebuilding On-Store with React so Loop can work with Hydrogen-based headless storefronts. 

We’re just getting started, too. There’s lots of work ahead. However, we’re proud of the work we’ve done up to this point. Hydrogen is an exciting new framework that Shopify has put a lot of resources into developing, and it makes it easier for developers to access the increased flexibility React offers. It also gives us at Loop the chance to build things that not only integrate seamlessly, but deliver utility merchants need. It’s essentially another way for us to deliver products, features, and functionality.

I’d always wanted to work with React, but never had the chance to go in-depth. This opportunity has let me learn a lot about React, and I look forward to continuing this project.

Interested in working at Loop? Check out our careers page here.