Welcome to HackerNoon’s Meet the Hackathon Winner interview series, where we peel back the layers of winning projects across our hackathons for a peek at the technical and operational decisions that propelled them to our winners’ podium.

Meet Shugert: Proof of Usefulness Hackathon Winner in the HackerNoon Category

Shugert is a Shopify-focused engineering agency helping e-commerce businesses tackle everything from storefront performance and technical SEO to migrations, integrations, and conversion optimization.

After earning securing a place among the hackathon's winners, we caught up with Shugert's Samuel Noriega to discuss what the recognition means for an established business, the lessons learned from working with Shopify merchants, and how the team is using AI and automation to rethink its approach to e-commerce engineering.

What does this Hackathon win mean for your project?

The Proof of Usefulness Hackathon was meaningful because the competition focused on something we care deeply about: whether what you build actually solves a problem and gets used. Shugert has been around for years, so we are past the stage of proving that we can build things. The more important question is whether our work creates measurable value for the businesses using it. Having HackerNoon recognize that was a strong validation of the direction we have taken.

What first convinced you this was a problem worth solving? How were people dealing with it before, and where did you see room for a better approach?

We kept seeing ecommerce teams face the same gap. They could hire a large agency, depend on individual freelancers, or try to solve increasingly technical Shopify problems internally. None of those options consistently combined speed, senior engineering, ecommerce knowledge, and accountability.

We saw room for a model where experienced Shopify engineers could work directly on the problems that actually affect growth: migrations, performance, technical SEO, CRO, integrations, analytics, and storefront architecture. The goal was never to add another layer of consulting. It was to get closer to execution.

What have users taught you that you didn't anticipate? Was there a piece of feedback or an unexpected use case that changed what you built or prioritized?

One lesson was that clients rarely experience their problems in neat categories. A performance issue can become an SEO issue, a theme change can create a conversion problem, and a migration can affect analytics, rankings, integrations, and revenue at the same time. That pushed us away from treating development, SEO, CRO, and data as separate services. We increasingly approach Shopify as one interconnected system and prioritize understanding the whole storefront before changing individual pieces.

Since your initial Proof of Usefulness report, what’s been the most significant development for the team? This could be a milestone, a new challenge, or a change in direction.1 response

The biggest change has been moving further from isolated tasks toward continuous engineering relationships with Shopify brands. We are increasingly involved in larger migrations, technical SEO recovery, performance work, CRO, and ongoing storefront engineering rather than simply completing a predefined list of development requests. At the same time, we have been investing heavily in internal AI and automation systems that help a small senior team research, diagnose, and execute work faster without removing human engineering judgment.

What’s next for Shugert, and what will that make possible for the people you serve?

The next step for Shugert is building a more continuous engineering model around Shopify: combining senior developers with AI-assisted research, diagnostics, monitoring, and execution. The goal is not to replace developers with AI. It is to remove more of the repetitive work around identifying problems, collecting evidence, and preparing changes so experienced engineers can spend more time making the decisions that matter. For the brands we work with, that should mean faster iteration, fewer technical surprises, and better visibility into what is actually happening inside their storefront.

Finally, what’s one piece of advice you’d give someone thinking about entering a HackerNoon Hackathon?

Build the proof before you build the pitch. Start with a real problem, put something in front of real users, and pay attention to what they actually use. A smaller product with evidence that it solves something is much more interesting than an ambitious idea supported only by projections.