The largest video platform in the world…
By 11 or 12, he began rewriting the code of the games he played and modifying computer hardware as a hobby.
Lütke dropped out of school and entered an apprenticeship program at the Koblenzer Carl-Benz-School to become a computer programmer after tenth grade.
He went to Carl Benz School (BBS technology Koblenz) Germany
He couldn't find software to build his first e-commerce website, so he built it himself. It was 2004 and Lütke wanted to get his online shop up and running within a week. ... Lütke and his partner Scott Lake each put $20,000 into the business but it wasn't really enough. So Lütke built the e-commerce website himself.
Lütke always loved the Ruby programming language, an open-source coding language with Japanese-only documentation at the time. He learned the language by looking at the code, creating and launching the Snowdevil website about 2.5 months later.
“I really really love the idea of constructing something in your brain, having this idea – it’s a little bit like painting. You have an idea for something and the programming language ends up becoming the mechanism for translating this idea you have in your head onto a canvas.If you have an amazing landscape but they give you crayons, it’s possible to build a massive landscape with crayons, but it always be a crayons painting. So this was sort of in the way Java and others…they just didn’t match up with the way my brain ended up constructing the relationships that make up software.”
During those 2.5 months, Lütke spent 16 hours a day programming.
to keep learning…
In 2004, Lütke, along with his partners, Daniel Weinand and Scott Lake, launched Snowdevil, an online snowboard shop. Lütke built a new e-commerce platform for the site, using Ruby on Rails. Soon after, the Snowdevil founders shifted their focus from snowboards to e-commerce and launched Shopify in 2006.
It was a rough start for Tobias Lütke in the first year of Shopify because the profits weren't greatly made by the company and no one had heard of it.