Brightwork Vol.01: a new post-DotDev gathering in Toronto

On July 23, Brightwork Vol.01 filled The East Room for a full day built around six fifteen-minute talks, a panel on building in a post-LLM world, a proper lunch, and two unhurried hours of the conversations that always outlast the talks themselves.

Presented by ShopDev Alliance and Design Packs, Brightwork felt less like a conference and more like the room DotDev attendees end up in anyway, just organized on purpose this time. Talks covered everything from Alexandre Bouchard asking whether webhooks are dead yet, to Sakshi Gupta's playbook for the agent-native merchant lifecycle, to Gavin Ballard on building defensible Shopify offerings in the age of AI.

The panel, "Reading the Currents: Themes, Apps, and Services in a Post-LLM World," brought together builders from across the ecosystem, hosted by Shopify's own Liam Griffin. Partway through, Liam pulled our Head of Operations, Sam Forde, up on stage, not something Sam saw coming when he walked in that morning.