Why Context Is a Core Engineering Practice at Shopify
At Shopify Engineering, "context" refers to the why, what, and how behind our development philosophies, approaches, and choices. It's the shared understanding that lets developers do their best work, and it doesn't accumulate by accident. Three long-running programs carry most of that load: an internal Development Handbook, a developer presentation series called Dev Talks, and internal technical podcasts. Each is built by and for Shopify developers, with active sponsorship from leadership.
The Development Handbook: From One Doc to a Company Resource
The Handbook grew out of a practical need. When Jean-Michel Lemieux (JML), now Shopify's CTO, joined the company in 2015, he had to learn the platform quickly. Documentation was scattered, and much of the knowledge lived only in people's heads. His response was a simple Google Doc to capture what he learned about Shopify's technical and architectural landscape.
The document proved useful beyond its original audience. It grew to include a history of Shopify's development, an architectural overview, our development philosophy, the technology stack, production environment details, and incident handling guidance. As its value became clear, the next step was turning it into a proper internal website—searchable, navigable, and visible across the engineering organization. A small team built the site, and the Development Handbook went live in 2018.
Since then, developers from across disciplines have contributed hundreds of topics. The Handbook now covers development culture and practices, guidance on key technologies, development principles, and detailed content on deployment, management, and monitoring. Contributors use familiar GitHub workflows—pull requests and reviews—and write in Markdown. The site runs on Middleman, and developers themselves maintain it, handling everything from design refreshes (including dark mode) to search improvements and client-side rendering of KaTeX equations.
Although the Handbook is crowd-sourced, a small Developer Context team provides oversight. That team defines the information architecture, evangelizes the Handbook, and helps developers contribute and update content.
The Development Handbook allows our team to push knowledge about Sorbet, static-typing in Ruby, and our best practices to the rest of the company. It's a necessary resource for all our newcomers and a good one even for our experts. A must read.
Running a central repository brings ongoing tensions. Some content belongs closer to the code in GitHub, while other material with a narrower audience might work better on a standalone site. There's constant pressure in both directions—to add to the Handbook or to move content out of it. Keeping content fresh is its own challenge. An ownership model asks teams to maintain topics related to their mandates, but engineering teams reorganize and shift focus, which undermines that approach.
These governance challenges don't have a clean solution yet. What keeps the Handbook viable is the sharing culture among Shopify developers: contributors update content proactively, and others fix anything outdated they encounter. A more systematic maintenance approach is under exploration, but there likely won't be a one-time fix. The Handbook will keep evolving, as the company does, to help developers get up to speed and understand how and why things are done.
Dev Talks: Developer-Led Presentations, On Demand
Dev Talks began in 2014 as a weekly open stage for demos, prototypes, experiments, and technical findings. The team running it has changed over the years, along with its name, but the goals have stayed consistent: a place for developers to share leading-edge work, explorations, wins, and occasional failures with peers. Presenters build public speaking skills and get recognition for their work. The Developer Context team took over the program in 2018.
Before the shift to remote work, talks happened in large cafeteria spaces with big screens, giving proceedings an informal feel. Many presenters used slides to organize their thoughts, though some talks were off the cuff or purely demos.
Shopify's move to Digital by Design in 2020 changed the model to on-demand. Developers now record their presentations so colleagues can watch anytime. Talks have no prescribed time limits, though most land around 15 to 20 minutes.
The Developer Context team handles promotion through email and Slack, has simplified the sign-up process, and created branding including a Dev Talks logo and presentation template. Talks live on a Dev Talks channel in Shopify's internal TV platform, keeping them consistent and easy to find.
Dev Talks have given me the opportunity to share my excitement about the projects I've worked on with other developers. They have helped me develop confidence and improve my public speaking skills while also enabling me to build my personal brand at Shopify.
The on-demand model is still new, and the team is monitoring how it performs before deciding on further changes. What's clear is that the desire to share technical context remains strong, as does the appetite for learning from colleagues.
Internal Podcasts: Deep Dives for Engineers and Beyond
Podcasts are a newer context channel at Shopify. Tobi Lütke, founder and CEO, has hosted an internal podcast called Context since 2017. Its scope is wide and often technology-focused, but it targets the whole company rather than just engineers.
For technical conversations aimed squarely at developers, the Technical Leadership Team (TLT)—a group of senior developers advising on major technical decisions—launched its own internal podcast called Shift. The goal is to unpack technical decisions and dig deep into the context around them.
The Shift podcast is where we talk about ideas that are worth reinforcing in Shopify Engineering. All systems degrade over time, so this forum lets us ensure that the best parts are properly oiled.
About once a month, TLT members sit down virtually with a senior engineering leader to probe specifics around technologies or concepts. These recorded conversations can run up to an hour. Recent episodes have covered machine learning and artificial intelligence at Shopify, system resiliency, and how we approach extensibility.
The podcasts are available in audio and video formats with full transcripts. Because they're lengthy deep dives, developers can listen in partial segments whenever it suits them, and usage data shows strong uptake. The team will keep measuring whether the format resonates over the long term.
Context Is a Habit, Not a Project
These three programs are representative, not exhaustive. Context also flows through email newsletters, Slack announcement channels, town halls with AMA segments, video messages from executives, and team demos—plus ordinary meetings. Post-pandemic, in-person gatherings may return for intense bursts of context sharing paired with prototyping and team building.
The formats keep iterating, and new ideas emerge alongside formal programs like the Handbook, Dev Talks, and Shift. What matters is that the environment promotes, recognizes, and celebrates sharing knowledge, with real buy-in from leadership.
