Last summer, Taylor Page stood on a stage in Toronto and accepted a Shopify Build Award for Community. This summer, he is going back to that stage with a microphone.

We are thrilled to share that our Founding Developer is speaking at Shopify DotDev 2026, July 21 and 22 at the Automotive Building in Toronto.

If the name is new to you, DotDev is the event formerly known as Editions.dev. It is Shopify's flagship gathering for the developers, agencies, and app partners who build the platform, and it requires an active Shopify Partner account just to get in the door. This year it doubled from one day to two, tickets were capped at six per partner organization, and it sold out. Getting a seat in that room is hard. Getting a slot on the schedule is something else entirely.

The talk

Beyond theme settings: The metaobjects configuration layer

Every developer who has built a serious Shopify theme has hit the same wall. Theme settings and section schema were designed for a certain scale of configuration, and past a certain point you find yourself bending them into shapes they were never meant to hold. Toggles multiply. Naming conventions collapse. Merchants get handed a settings panel nobody can navigate.

Taylor's session is about what happens when you stop fighting that and move configuration into metaobjects instead. Structured. Reusable. Queryable. And owned by the merchant, rather than trapped inside a theme that gets replaced every few years.

It is a practical talk with a real schema and a live look at the bridge between metafields and metaobject references that most tutorials skip right past. If you have ever inherited a theme with two hundred settings and no idea which ones are load-bearing, this one is for you.

What else Taylor is doing that week

DotDev week in Toronto has become something bigger than the conference itself. The partner events, the meetups, the hallway conversations that turn into next quarter's tooling. Taylor is in the middle of most of it.

A community guide to Toronto. Ahead of the event, Taylor built sdatoronto.dev alongside Trudy MacNabb of Design Packs. It is a free guide to the city for developers coming in for the week, with a map, a list of the satellite events happening around DotDev, and a personal agenda builder so you can keep track of what you actually said yes to. No signup, no cost. Just something useful for a few thousand people landing in the same city at the same time.

Liquid Weekly, recorded live. Taylor and Karl Meisterheim are bringing the Liquid Weekly podcast to the floor at DotDev, recording with Shopify leadership and some of the leading partners in the ecosystem. Conversations you will not hear anywhere else, captured while the news is still warm.

Brightwork Vol. 01. When the conference wraps on the 22nd, the week is not quite done. On July 23, Taylor with ShopDev Alliance and Design Packs are hosting Brightwork at The East Room in Toronto. Partners, agency owners, app developers, and Shopifolk in one room. It is the first in-person event SDA has put on, and the response has already outrun what we planned for.

Why this matters to our clients

It would be easy to file all of this under community goodwill and leave it there. It is not.

The merchants we build for benefit from the fact that their developer is in the room where the platform's direction gets debated. When a new API lands, we are not reading the changelog three months late. We are asking the team that shipped it what it is actually for.

What better way to build things "the Shopify way" than to help shape it?

Speaking at DotDev is a nice line on a bio. Knowing Shopify at that depth is what shows up in our work.

Come find us

If you are in Toronto for the week, come say hello to Taylor. He will be the one talking about metaobjects to anyone who makes eye contact.