How I Learned to Build Custom Shopify Apps and React Native Expo Apps in One Chaotic Week

My name is Laraib Rabbani, and this week felt less like a work week and more like the final act of a slightly overdramatic indie film where the lead character is powered by stubbornness, browser tabs, and inappropriate levels of confidence.

By the end of it, though, something important had changed.

I can now build custom Shopify apps and React Native apps with Expo.

That is the polished version of my story.

The unpolished version includes weekend tension at home, a Shopify setup that looked clever until it very much was not, a backend rescue mission, and one unexpectedly peaceful stretch of time where my wife started reading her novel and I managed to disappear into a very good book about Expo.

So yes, it was educational.

It was also emotionally athletic.

It started with ambition, which is usually where trouble starts too

I like learning by building. Give me a clean tutorial and I will appreciate it. Give me a real problem that refuses to behave and suddenly I am fully invested, mildly unreasonable, and unable to leave my desk until the thing makes sense.

This week, I was deep in Shopify and mobile app work at the same time.

On one side, I was trying to push Shopify beyond a simple theme level solution. On the other, I was learning Expo properly and seeing how quickly a mobile app idea could move once the mental model clicked.

That combination should probably come with a warning label.

What made the whole week more interesting is that I do not approach tech only as a developer. I also bring a business psychology lens into the work. That changes how I build.

I do not just ask whether something works.

I ask how people will behave when they use it.

Where will they hesitate.

What will confuse them.

What feels frictionless.

What creates trust.

What makes a user continue, and what makes them quietly disappear.

That way of thinking turned out to be useful all week, because both Shopify and mobile apps are really stories about behaviour. Every button is a prompt. Every delay is a doubt. Every broken flow is a drop in confidence.

In business psychology terms, behaviour follows environment. In product terms, that means users do what the system makes easy.

And this week I learned that developers are not exempt from that rule. We also do what the system makes easy, which is why we keep trying the wrong shortcut until the problem forces us to grow up.

My wife had a strong and entirely reasonable point

This all happened over the weekend too, which did not exactly improve the domestic optics.

At one point my wife was properly annoyed.

And to be fair, she had a case.

It was the weekend. I was still working. Not pretending to work. Properly working. The kind where your face says, “I am just checking one thing,” while your laptop and posture clearly indicate that you have entered a long term commitment with the problem.

There is a specific look your spouse gives you when they realise you are not wrapping up soon.

It is not rage.

It is disappointment with administrative structure.

A calm internal report is being filed against you.

Fortunately, the story did not end with me being rightly banished from civilisation.

She picked up her novel, got absorbed in that world, and the room became quiet.

That quiet mattered.

Anyone who works deeply knows that focused learning is not only about intelligence. It is about cognitive bandwidth. Attention is a finite resource. Once the environment settled, I had the space to read properly.

And that was when I got into a genuinely excellent book on Expo.

Not skimmed it. Not glanced at three pages and declared myself enlightened. I actually read it.

That shifted everything.

Expo stopped feeling like a tool and started feeling like a language

Before that point, Expo sat in my head as something powerful but slightly abstract. I knew what it did. I understood the appeal. I could see why developers liked it. But there is a difference between recognising a tool and feeling fluent with it.

Once I sat with the book and gave it proper attention, the whole thing became more intuitive.

The structure made sense.

The speed made sense.

The development flow made sense.

Most importantly, the creative possibilities started to feel immediate.

That is always a satisfying moment.

Something goes from “I should learn this properly at some point” to “Right, I can build with this now.”

I love that transition. It feels like moving from watching a film to stepping into it.

Expo opened that door for me this week. It made mobile development feel practical, not distant. Elegant, not intimidating. Fast enough to encourage experimentation, but structured enough to support serious work.

And because I think in terms of people as much as platforms, I could immediately see the behavioural value of it. Mobile apps live and die on experience. How quickly something loads. How clearly it guides. How naturally it reduces decision fatigue. How calmly it asks for action.

That is not only development.

That is applied psychology through interface and flow.

Shopify was where the comedy turned into drama

If Expo was the satisfying learning arc, Shopify was the plotline where the background music gets tense.

I had built something through theme files that looked promising. On the surface, it felt like the kind of practical solution developers love to celebrate. Efficient. Clever. Nicely inserted into the existing setup.

There was just one tiny issue.

It was not creating orders.

Which is a very creative way for ecommerce functionality to fail.

Everything can look elegant until the one thing that actually matters refuses to happen.

This is where experience and business psychology started to overlap in a useful way.

One of the most important ideas in business psychology is that frustration is rarely caused by effort alone. It comes from blocked progress. People can tolerate a challenge when movement is visible. What breaks morale is doing all the right things and still not getting the expected result.

That was exactly the feeling.

The interface said one thing.

Reality said another.

The flow had the appearance of order, but underneath it, the outcome was not there.

And that kind of mismatch is dangerous in products too. When a system signals success but fails at the actual task, trust collapses quickly.

So I stopped trying to force a theme level solution to behave like a full application.

That was the turning point.

Instead of patching around the limitation, I moved to the more correct answer.

I built a custom Shopify app.

And honestly, that felt like one of the most rewarding moments of the week.

Because the issue was never only technical. It was architectural.

Theme files were useful for surface level behaviour, but the moment real backend control became necessary, the smarter path was obvious.

I needed logic that lived where logic should live.

I needed a backend.

I needed the confidence that comes from solving the actual problem instead of cosmetically negotiating with it.

That is what the custom app gave me.

The best part was not the code. It was the shift in identity

There is a quiet difference between learning about a capability and claiming it through work.

At the start of the week, I was exploring.

By the end of the week, I had crossed into delivery.

That matters.

I am not interested in collecting trendy labels and announcing that I am “on a journey” every six minutes like a man trying to win an award for public self awareness.

I care about what I can actually build.

Now I can say, with real confidence, that I build custom Shopify apps when a store needs more than theme edits and surface level tweaks.

And I can build React Native apps with Expo when a product needs a thoughtful mobile experience.

That is a meaningful expansion of what I do at laraibrabbani.net.

It also reflects the way I like to work.

I enjoy joining technical execution with behavioural insight. Businesses do not only need software that functions. They need systems people can trust, use, understand, and adopt.

That is where my business psychology background strengthens the development work.

I notice friction.

I care about motivation.

I think about attention.

I look for the hidden reasons people abandon processes, ignore features, or hesitate at the point of action.

Good development handles logic.

Great product thinking handles human behaviour.

I aim for both.

This week reminded me what fulfilling work actually feels like

It is not always tidy.

It is not always balanced.

It is certainly not always spouse approved.

But it is fulfilling.

This week gave me that rare feeling developers chase but do not always name clearly. The sense that your skills have genuinely expanded. The sense that something which felt unfamiliar on Monday has become part of your toolkit by Sunday.

That is deeply satisfying.

It is also a little funny, because from the outside it probably looked like I spent the weekend staring at a screen and making my own life harder.

Which, to be fair, is not inaccurate.

But from the inside, it felt like progress.

Real progress.

The kind earned through trial, error, adjustment, reading, testing, annoyance, persistence, and eventually that brilliant little moment when everything stops resisting you at once.

You sit back.

You look at what works.

And for a brief second you become unbearable to yourself because you know you have done something good.

Where this goes next

So that was my week.

A little comedy.

A little drama.

A lot of tabs.

A fair amount of marital risk.

And a genuinely worthwhile outcome.

I am Laraib Rabbani, and I now build custom Shopify apps and React Native Expo apps alongside the broader development and strategic work I already do.

More importantly, I build them with an understanding that good digital products are never only technical systems. They are behavioural environments. They shape decisions, trust, attention, and action.

That is what interests me.

That is what I am getting better at.

And that is what made this week feel like more than a technical upgrade.

It felt like the kind of chapter that moves the story forward.

If you are building something interesting and need someone who can think in code, product, and people at the same time, you know where to find me.