A few weeks ago in my first quarterly hackathon at Shopify I joined a team that was building a Shopify App to help charities issue donation receipts for orders on their store. We got pretty far during the hackathon and afterwards I kept working on it in my free time. It was a good way to dog food our API and tooling which was my responsibility at work.

I finally finished the app and a few days ago it launched on the Shopify App Store. The app automates the process of sending customers tax receipts for their donations to a non-profit Shopify store using webhooks. It’s a pretty cool little app and a good example of how to build a simple piece of automation using webhooks.

I knew the scope of the app was going to be small so I wanted to pick an appropriately minimalist framework instead of Rails. I went with Sinatra and ended up extracting a small gem shopify-sinatra-app for others to use. The app itself is also open source, you can check out all the code and follow the ongoing development and maintenance here.