If you haven’t read about Shopify’s new theme development toolkit, Slate, check out the introductory post here. It provides you a starting set of files for developing your own custom Shopify theme along with handy build tools to speed up and optimize your workflow.

But what if you’re not starting from scratch? Whether you’re basing your work off an existing theme or supporting a client’s existing theme, there’s no doubt you’ve wanted to improve your development workflow at some point.

With Slate installed (npm install -g @shopify/slate), you can run slate migrate to convert an existing theme into the folder structure compatible with Slate.

I’ve been writing CSS for years. Sometimes — ashamed as I am to admit — I get snobby and feel I know it better than the back of my hand. This morning sent a shot of reality with something as simple as CSS specificity. In fact, many developers I work with were also surprised to learn this little bit of knowledge.

At Shopify, we have something we call the assets gem. It’s a collection of our core styles that we can use on any project not hosted directly in our admin. Many of our channels (Amazon, Facebook, etc) use this assets gem in their projects which are then loaded in an iframe inside of our admin.