Unlocking Real-time Predictions with Shopify's Machine Learning Platform - Shopify
Learn how Shopify Data built new online inference capabilities into its Machine Learning Platform to deploy and serve models for real-time prediction at scale.
Improving the Developer Experience with the Ruby LSP - Shopify
The Ruby LSP is a new language server built at Shopify that makes coding in Ruby even better by providing extra Ruby features for any editor that has a client layer for the LSP. In this article, we’ll cover how we built the Ruby LSP, the features included within it, and how you can install it.
The Case Against Monkey Patching, From a Rails Core Team Member - Shopify
Monkey patching is considered one of the more powerful features of the Ruby programming language. However, by the end of this post I’m hoping to convince you that they should be used sparingly, if at all, because they are brittle, dangerous, and often unnecessary. I’ll also share tips on how to use them as safely as possible in the rare cases where you do need to monkey patch.
The 25 Percent Rule for Tackling Technical Debt - Shopify
Let’s talk about technical debt. Let’s talk about practical usable approaches for actually paying it down on a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly basis. Let’s talk about what debt needs to be fixed now versus what can wait for better planning.
ShopifyQL Notebooks: Simplifying Querying with Commerce Data Models - Shopify
We recently released ShopifyQL Notebooks, a powerful self-serve tool which enables merchants to explore their business metrics without any SQL expertise. Here’s how we used ShopifyQL and commerce data models to make it possible.
Bringing Javascript to WebAssembly for Shopify Functions - Shopify
While we’re working on getting our Shopify Functions infrastructure ready for the public beta, we thought we’d use this opportunity to shine some light on how we brought JavaScript to WebAssembly, how we made everything fit within our very tight Shopify Function constraints, and what our plans for the future look like.
The Complex Data Models Behind Shopify's Tax Insights Feature - Shopify
The intensive data work behind Shopify's Tax Insights feature required building functionality to handle dynamically changing information
The Hardest Part of Writing Tests is Getting Started - Shopify
The hardest part of writing tests is setting things up. Test suites have complicated helper tools, stubs, and fixtures. Learn 4 things you can do to get started.
Performance Testing At Scale—for BFCM and Beyond - Shopify
Let’s unpack our approach to BFCM Scale Testing to explore some of what it takes to ensure that our ecommerce platform can handle the busiest weekend of the year.
From Farmer to Security Engineer: How Dev Degree Helped Me Find My Dream Job - Shopify
This story looks at the opportunity Dev Degree gave me, the challenges I overcame, and the weaknesses that turned out to be strengths. If you’re thinking about a career in tech, but don’t think you have the stuff for it, this story is for you.
Making Your React Native Gestures Feel Natural - Shopify
When working with draggable elements in React Native mobile apps, there are some simple ways to help gestures and animations feel better and more natural.
Ruby 3.2’s YJIT is Production-Ready - Shopify
YJIT, a just-in-time (JIT) implementation on top of CRuby built at Shopify, is now production-ready and delivering major improvements to performance and speed. Maxime shares the updates that have been made in this newest version of YJIT, and future plans for further optimization.
How Good Documentation Can Improve Productivity - Shopify
Good documentation has many benefits, but first and foremost it boosts engineers’ productivity. Here are a few tips to encourage a strong writing culture.
From Ruby to Node: Overhauling Shopify’s CLI for a Better Developer Experience - Shopify
In this blog post, Pedro explains why we rewrote Shopify CLI into Node instead of Ruby, the tradeoffs that came with the decision, the principles we embraced in this new iteration, and the challenges and ideas ahead of us to explore.
Reliving Your Happiest HTTP Interactions with Ruby’s VCR Gem - Shopify
VCR is a Ruby library that records HTTP interactions and plays them back to your test suite, verifying input and returning predictable output. Here’s how and when Prater (Staff Engineer) recommends you use it.
Monte Carlo Simulations: Separating Signal from Noise in Sampled Success Metrics - Shopify
Check out this guide for using a Monte Carlo simulation to identify the size and confidence percentage of your sampled success metric.
React Native Skia: A Year in Review and a Look Ahead - Shopify
A look at React Native Skia in 2022 and what kept Christian Falch, Colin Gray, and William Candillon busy. Plus, a look at what's ahead for the library in 2023.
Migrating our Largest Mobile App to React Native - Shopify
In 2020, we announced that React Native is the future of mobile at Shopify. As part of that journey, we’ve been migrating Shopify Mobile (our largest app at 300 screens per platform) from native to React Native. Here’s how it’s going.
Optimizing Ruby’s Memory Layout: Variable Width Allocation - Shopify
Shopify is improving CRuby’s performance in Ruby 3.2 by optimizing the memory layout in the garbage collector through the Variable Width Allocation project.
Year in Review 2022: Tenderlove's Ruby and Rails Reflections and Predictions - Shopify
Senior Staff Engineer and Rails core team member Aaron Patterson recaps his favourite Ruby and Rails updates of 2022 and some predictions (okay, so maybe it’s more of a wish list) for 2023.
Automatically Rotating GitHub Tokens (So You Don’t Have To) - Shopify
GitHub personal access tokens (PATs) are like a key: a very, very large key that opens a very, very wide door. Long-lived tokens that have all the access of a developer’s account won’t just cause a leak—it’ll be a flood. Here’s how we rotate tokens automatically, and how you can do t too.
Shopify Embraces Rust for Systems Programming - Shopify
Shopify is adopting Rust as our systems programming language, and joining the Rust Foundation.
3 (More) Tips for Optimizing Apache Flink Applications - Shopify
Earlier this year, we shared our tips for optimizing large stateful Apache Flink applications. Below we’ll walk you through 3 more best practices.
Three Essential Remote Work Practices for Engineering Teams - Shopify
It’s been around two and a half years since Shopify became a fully remote-first company. James Stanier shares three tips for succeeding remotely.
Planning in Bets: Risk Mitigation at Scale - Shopify
What do you do with a finite amount of time to deal with an infinite number of things that can go wrong? This post breaks down a high-level risk mitigation process into four questions that can be applied to nearly any scenario in order to help you make the best use of your time and resources available.
Using Server Sent Events to Simplify Real-time Streaming at Scale - Shopify
We walk through how we implemented an SSE server that's scalable and load-balanced to simplify and improve a real-time data visualization application.
How to Export Datadog Metrics for Exploration in Jupyter Notebooks - Shopify
A step-by-step guide for extracting Datadog metrics in Python for in-depth analysis in Jupyter Notebooks.
Our Solution for Measuring React Native Rendering Times - Shopify
After Shopify went all-in on React Native, we had to find a way to confirm our mobile apps are fast. The solution is an open-source @shopify/react-native-performance library, which measures rendering times in React Native apps.
Implementing Server-Driven UI Architecture on the Shop App - Shopify
Ashwin explains why and how we implemented server-driven UI in the Shop App’s Store Screen, and his experience working on the project as a Dev Degree intern.
What We Learned from Open-Sourcing FlashList - Shopify
Here's how we launched the React Native List library FlashList as an open-source project, and how you can make your next open-source project a success.
Caching Without Marshal Part 2: The Path to MessagePack - Shopify
Shopify wanted a cache format that would not blow up when we shipped code changes. Part two of Caching Without Marshal describes the MessagePack format, and how we migrated to MessagePack.
Caching Without Marshal Part 1: Marshal from the Inside Out - Shopify
Shopify wanted a cache format that would not blow up when we shipped code changes. Part one of Caching Without Marshal describes Marshal, Ruby’s ultimate sharp knife, able to transform almost any object into a binary blob and back.
Apollo Cache is Your Friend, If You Get To Know It - Shopify
Shopify's Raman Lally delves into the Apollo GraphQL client cache and the life cycle of objects that are cached within it.
Reducing BigQuery Costs: How We Fixed A $1 Million Query - Shopify
We discovered a query that nearly cost us $1 million USD a month in BigQuery. Below, we’ll share our tips for lowering costs in BigQuery.
Mixing It Up: Remix Joins Shopify to Push the Web Forward - Shopify
We are very excited to announce that the open-source web framework Remix and its team are joining Shopify.
The Management Poles of Developer Infrastructure Teams - Shopify
There are 3 management poles for developer infrastructure teams that are thus tricky to balance: management support, system and domain expertise, and road maps.
A Software Engineer's Guide to Working Across Time Zones - Shopify
Words I've often heard associated with cross-time zone software engineering teams include “challenging”, “tricky”, and “difficulties”. Here are a few tips to make asynchronous communication a positive experience.
Hubble: Our Tool for Encapsulating and Extending Security Tools - Shopify
With the end of office centricity at Shopify, suddenly the work of securing our devices got a lot more important, and a lot more difficult. So, we built Hubble.
How to Structure Your Data Team for Maximum Influence - Shopify
We share the framework that’s worked best for structuring our data teams and that's empowered them to influence business decisions and drive impact.
Finding Relationships Between Ruby’s Top 100 Packages and Their Dependencies - Shopify
As packages frequently depend on other packages, could some of these big (more than 180M downloads) packages depend on small (less than 180M downloads) packages?
On the Importance of Pull Request Discipline - Shopify
Unorganized pull requests are the bane of large codebases. Follow Yash's tips to prevent your PRs from getting roasted in the group chat.
How to Write Code Without Having to Read It - Shopify
Do we need to read code before editing it? In order to safely fix a bug or update a feature, we may need to learn some things about the code. However, we’d prefer to learn only that information.
The Engineering Story Behind Flex Comp - Shopify
How we built Flex Comp: Shopify's new approach to compensation that gives employees the ability to choose how they want to allocate their total reward between base salary, Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), and Stock Options today, with new features like Shop Cash in the future.
Safely Adding NOT NULL Columns to Your Database Tables - Shopify
Recommendations from Shopify's Data Migrations team for adding NOT NULL columns safely to your own database tables, based on a recent investigation into schema change safety using using the popular Large Hadron Migrator (LHM) gem.
A Software Engineer’s Guide to Giving Feedback that Actually Matters - Shopify
A few tips for software engineers who want to deliver effective feedback during pull request reviews.
A Flexible Framework for Effective Pair Programming - Shopify
Pair programming is one of the most important tools we use while mentoring early talent in Shopify's Dev Degree program. It’s an agile software development technique where two people work together, either to share context, solve a problem, or learn from one another.
Lessons From Building Android Widgets - Shopify
Shopify share with you the challenges we faced building Android widgets and how we solved them.
Lessons From Building iOS Widgets - Shopify
Shopify shares with you how we approached building iOS widgets and some of the challenges we faced.
What is a Full Stack Data Scientist? - Shopify
At Shopify, we've embraced full stack data science, so we chatted with our data scientists to share what it means to be a full stack data scientist.
Managing React Form State Using the React-Form Library - Shopify
We’ll delve further into Shopify’s open source Quilt repo that contains 72 npm packages, one of which is the react-form library.
Leveraging Go Worker Pools to Scale Server-side Data Sharing - Shopify
How Shopify scaled our Server Pixels service to increase its event processing performance by 170%.
Four Approaches to Debugging Server-side WebAssembly - Shopify
While it has many benefits for customizing business logic, WebAssembly poses new challenges when debugging. In this post, Jeff covers four approaches that can be taken to step debug code that will be running in a WebAssembly environment.
Focus On Behavior, Not State, for a More Maintainable Codebase - Shopify
This post is about how we moved from focusing on state (what an object is) towards behavior (what an object does) while building our Purchase Options APIs as a way to create a more maintainable codebase.
RailsConf 2022: 10 Shopify Tech Talks You Might Have Missed - Shopify
Watch Shopify's tech talent tackle topics ranging from virtual machines, performance improvements, and investing in open source teams at RailsConf 2022
When Culture and Code Reviews Collide, Communication is Key - Shopify
To prevent a misunderstanding, it’s important for developers to understand how different cultures approach reviewing codes, and how diverse teams can establish healthier communication practices when giving and receiving feedback.
Shopify Data’s Guide To Opportunity Sizing - Shopify
Shopify’s guide to Opportunity Sizing, a method that data scientists can use to quantify the potential impact of an initiative ahead of making the decision to invest in it.
How We Built Oxygen: Hydrogen’s Counterpart for Hosting Custom Storefronts - Shopify
The story of Oxygen, Hydrogen’s counterpart that makes hosting Hydrogen custom storefronts easy and seamless on Shopify.
How We Enable Two-Day Delivery in the Shopify Fulfillment Network - Shopify
A simplified overview of how we built two-day delivery in the Shopify Fulfillment Network (SFN).
Instant Performance Upgrade: From FlatList to FlashList - Shopify
Shopify’s React Native Foundations team created FlashList, a fast and performant list component that can be swapped into your project with minimal effort.
When is JIT Faster Than A Compiler? - Shopify
I had this conversation over and over before I really understood it. It goes: “X language can be as fast as a compiled language because it has a JIT compiler!” “Wow! It’s as fast as C?” “Well, no, we’re working on it. But in theory, it could be even FASTER than C!” “Really? How would that work?” “A JIT can see what your code does at runtime and optimize for only that. So it can do things C can’t!”