Six Tips for Staying Technical as a CTO - Shopify
Shopify CTO Allan Leinwand explains how to stay technical as an engineering leader while balancing the demands of people leadership.
Spin Cycle: Shopify’s SFN Team Overcomes a Cloud-Development Spiral - Shopify
The process of getting SFN working on Spin, Shopify’s cloud-development tool, is a great example of the kind of hidden difficulty in technical work that's more related to human systems.
Mastering React’s Stable Values - Shopify
In this post, Colin Gray, Principal Developer at Shopify, delivers a crash course in how to make sense of stable values in React and when they matter most.
10 Tips for Building Resilient Payment Systems - Shopify
Top ten tips and tricks for building resilient payment systems from a Staff Developer working on Shopify’s payment infrastructure.
Data-Centric Machine Learning: Building Shopify Inbox’s Message Classification Model - Shopify
Our journey building a message classification model for Shopify Inbox with the data-centric approach, from defining our classification taxonomy to training our annotators on labeling.
5 Steps to Bounce Back from a Negative Performance Review - Shopify
Ebun breaks down how she used a not-so-great performance review to set clear development goals for herself and increase alignment with her lead, ultimately leading to a successful next review.
Spin Infrastructure Adventures: Containers, Systemd, and CGroups - Shopify
The Spin infrastructure team works hard at improving the stability of the system. In February 2022 we moved to Container Optimized OS (COS), the Google maintained operating system for their Kubernetes Engine SaaS offering. A month later we turned on multi-cluster to allow for increased scalability as more users came on board. Recently, we’ve increased default resources allotted to instances dramat
Shopify’s Technical Interview Process: What to Expect and How to Prepare - Shopify
This guide pulls back the curtain on what to expect during the interview process for technical roles at Shopify and sets you up for success with tips for each stage.
Shopify and Open Source: A Mutually Beneficial Relationship - Shopify
Shopify and Rails have grown up together. Both were in their infancy in 2004, and our CEO (Tobi) was one of the first contributors and a member of Rails Core. Shopify was built on top of Rails, and our engineering culture is rooted in the Rails Doctrine, from developer happiness to the omakase menu, sharp knives, and majestic monoliths. We embody the doctrine pillars. Shopify's success is due, in
The Story Behind Shopify’s Isospin Tooling - Shopify
You may have read that Shopify has built an in-house cloud development platform named Spin. In that post, we covered the history of the platform and how it powers our everyday work. In this post, we’ll take a deeper dive into one specific aspect of Spin: Isospin, Shopify’s systemd-based tooling that forms the core of how we run applications within Spin. The initial implementation of Spin used the
How to Build Trust as a New Manager in a Fully Remote Team - Shopify
A 90-day plan to help managers develop a way of working remotely and gain mastery over the tools and skills that build trust in the new environment.
Navigating Recurring Payments in India: A Backend Perspective - Shopify
To address the new RBI framework for recurring payments in Shopify’s billing platform, we worked with a local payment provider that could accommodate both card-based payments as well as a local payment method called Unified Payments Interface (UPI).
Perspectives on Onboarding: Joining Shopify as an Engineering Leader - Shopify
What’s it really like for new engineering leaders at Shopify? I asked Avanti Ketkar and Maria Robledo, who both joined the team this past year, to spill the tea about their first few months. They share their perspectives on how the onboarding experience helped them build context, relationships, and trust.
Introducing ShopifyQL: Our New Commerce Data Querying Language - Shopify
At Shopify, we recognize the positive impact data-informed decisions have on the growth of a business. But we also recognize that data exploration is gated to those without a data science or coding background. To make it easier for our merchants to inform their decisions with data, we built an accessible, commerce-focused querying language. We call it ShopifyQL. ShopifyQL enables Shopify Plus merc
How We Built Hydrogen: A React Framework for Building Custom Storefronts - Shopify
We’ve been building Hydrogen for more than a year. Here’s a look behind the scenes at how we did it, what we learned from making big bets, and what it was like building a new framework from the ground up on experimental technology.
Making Open Source Safer for Everyone with Shopify’s Bug Bounty Program - Shopify
Zack Deveau, Senior Application Security Engineer at Shopify, shares the details behind a recent contribution to the Rails library, inspired by a bug bounty report we received. He'll go over the report and its root cause, how we fixed it in our system, and how we took it a step further to make Rails more secure by upda
How We Built Shopify Party - Shopify
Shopify Party is a browser-based internal tool that we built to make our virtual hangouts more fun. With Shopify’s move to remote, we wanted to explore how to give people a break from video fatigue and create a new space designed for social interaction. Here's how we built it.
8 Data Conferences Shopify Data Thinks You Should Attend - Shopify
We asked our data scientists and engineers to curate a list of the top upcoming data conferences for 2022. Whether you’re looking for a virtual conference or in-person learning, we’ve got something that works for everyone.
The Journey to Cloud Development: How Shopify Went All-in on Spin - Shopify
How we reinvented our developer environment by going cloud native to keep up with increasing complexity and exponential growth.
Building a Form with Polaris - Shopify
A tutorial to create the basic form design that's meant to introduction to React including additional logic to emulate a fully functional React form.
To Thread or Not to Thread: An In-Depth Look at Ruby’s Execution Models - Shopify
An in-depth look at threads vs processes in Ruby web applications, and when you should use each.
Implementing Equality in Ruby - Shopify
Ruby is one of the few programming languages that get equality right. I often play around with other languages, but keep coming back to Ruby. This is because Ruby’s implementation of equality is so nice. Let's walk through all forms of equality in Ruby and how to implement them.
Our Favorite Moments From RailsConf 2022 - Shopify
The Rails community gathered in Portland for the first in-person RailsConf in two years. Shopify developers recap a few highlights from the three-day event.
Lessons Learned From Running Apache Airflow at Scale - Shopify
Shopify shares some of the lessons we learned and solutions we built in order to run Airflow at scale.
Asynchronous Communication is the Great Leveler in Engineering - Shopify
Shopify’s now on a journey of mindfully unraveling these default office behaviors and replacing them with remote-focused ways of working.
Double Entry Transition Tables: How We Track State Changes At Shopify - Shopify
Explore how Shopify built a data pipeline using double entry transition tables to answer the question: how many Shopify merchants are using Shopify Balance?
Shopify Invests in Research for Ruby at Scale - Shopify
Shopify is investing on Ruby on Rails at scale by funding high-profile academics to focus their work towards Ruby and the needs of the Ruby community.
Maestro: The Orchestration Language Powering Shopify Flow - Shopify
An overview of Shopify Flow's new orchestration language Maestro, highlighting its design and implementation as well as how neatly it integrates with and addresses the requirements.
Our Experience Porting the YJIT Ruby Compiler to Rust - Shopify
In this post, I want to give a nuanced perspective on our experience porting YJIT from C to Rust. I'll talk about the positives, but also discuss the things that we found challenging or suboptimal in our experience.
Talk Nerdy to Me: 10 Tech Podcast Recommendations from Shopify Engineering - Shopify
We asked our tech talent which podcasts they’re tuning into and curated a list of their favorites. We think you’ll find something on this list you’ll enjoy.
React Native Skia—For Us, For You, and For Fun - Shopify
React Native Skia, an open source project, provides a set of powerful 2D drawing primitives that are consistent across iOS, Android, and the Web.
Data Is An Art, Not Just A Science—And Storytelling Is The Key - Shopify
Data science is a balancing act between math, science, art, and communication. In this article, learn how to tell an effective data story illustrated with examples from Shopify.
Building a Business System Integration and Automation Platform at Shopify - Shopify
Companies organize and automate their internal processes with a multitude of business systems, Shopify, Salesforce, HubSpot, Airtable, Netsuite, Google Sheets and many more. Since companies function as a whole, these systems need to be able to talk to one another.
Möbius: Shopify’s Unified Edge - Shopify
How Shopify built the one network edge to front our services and systems.
Code Ranges: A Deeper Look at Ruby Strings - Shopify
An informal look at what makes encoding-aware strings in Ruby functional and performant, providing insight into all the wonderful things the Ruby VM does.
Leveraging Shopify’s API to Build the Latest Marketplace Kit - Shopify
In February, we released the second version of Marketplace Kit: a collection of boilerplate app code and documentation allowing third-party developers to integrate with Shopify, build selected commerce features and launch a world-class marketplace in any channel.
The Magic of Merlin: Shopify's New Machine Learning Platform - Shopify
Merlin, Shopify’s machine learning platform that can handle different (often conflicting) requirements, inputs, data types, dependencies, and integrations.
Best-in-Class Developer Experience with Vite and Hydrogen - Shopify
Hydrogen is a framework that combines React and Vite for creating custom storefronts on Shopify. It maximizes performance for end-users and provides a best-in-class developer experience for you and your team. Since it focuses on evergreen browsers, Hydrogen can leverage modern capabilities, best practices, and the latest tooling in web development to bring the future of ecommerce closer. Creating
10 Books Shopify’s Tech Talent Think You Should Read - Shopify
Shopify software engineers, developers and development managers name the books they think everyone in tech and engineering should read.
How We Built the Add to Favorite Animation in Shop - Shopify
"I just want you to feel it" - Jay Prince, from the song Feel It I use the word feeling a lot when working on animations and gestures. For example, animations or gestures sometimes feel right or wrong.
A Data Scientist’s Guide To Measuring Product Success - Shopify
If you’re a data scientist on a product team, much of your work involves getting a product ready for release. You may conduct exploratory data analyses to understand your product’s market, or build the data models and pipelines needed to power a new product feature, or design a machine learning model.
Shopify’s Bug Bounty Program Raises Maximum Payout in 2022 - Shopify
In 2022, Shopify's Bug Bounty Program is doubling the maximum reward to $100,000 and moving key services into the highest severity level.
Using Terraform to Manage Infrastructure - Shopify
Large applications are often a mix of code your team has written and third-party applications your team needs to manage. These third-party applications could be things like AWS or Docker. In my team’s case, it’s Twilio TaskRouter. The configuration of these services may not change as often as your app code does, but when it does, the process is fraught with the potential for errors. This is becaus
Creating a React Library for Consistent Data Visualization - Shopify
At Shopify, we tell a lot of stories through data visualization. This is the driving force behind business decisions—not only for our merchants, but also for teams within Shopify. With more than 10,000 Shopify employees, though, it is only natural that different teams started using different tools to display data.
After the Refactor: A Path to Faster Rendering with Liquid-C - Shopify
Not every feature of open-source template language Liquid has been ported over to Liquid-C, such as the If tag and For Tag. I started to look into how to compile Liquid’s If tag from Liquid-C, a process that would improve parsing time.
7 Tips For Optimizing Apache Flink Applications - Shopify
We’ve spent a lot of time on performance tuning our Apache Flink application. We’ll walk you through key lessons for optimizing large stateful Apache Flink applications
Test Budget: Time Constrained CI Feedback - Shopify
At Shopify we run more than 170,000 tests in our core monolith. Naturally, we're constantly exploring ways to make this faster, and the Test Infrastructure team analyzed the feasibility of introducing a test budget: a fixed amount of time for tests to run. The goal is to speed up the continuous integration (CI) test running phase by accepting more risk. To achieve that goal we used prioritization
Adding the V8 CPU Profiler to v8go - Shopify
V8 is Google’s open source high-performance JavaScript and WebAssembly engine written in C++. v8go is a library written in Go and C++ allowing users to execute JavaScript from Go using V8 isolates. Using Cgo bindings allows us to run JavaScript in Go at native performance. The v8go library, developed by Roger Chapman, aims to provide an idiomatic way for Go developers to interface with V8. As it t
RubyConf 2021: The Talks You Might Have Missed - Shopify
Shopify loves Ruby and opportunities to get together with other engineers who love Ruby to learn, share, and build relationships. In November, Rubyists from Shopify’s Ruby and Rails infrastructure teams gathered in Denver at RubyConf 2021 to immerse themselves in all things Ruby with a community of their peers. If you weren’t there or want to revisit the content, we’ve compiled a list of the talks
How to Get an Engineering Internship at Shopify: A Complete Guide - Shopify
The complete guide to getting an internship at Shopify. Interns work on real projects, solve hard problems, and gain practical feedback along the way.
Changing a polymorphic_type in Rails - Shopify
How my team redefined the way we store one of the polymorphic associations in the Shopify codebase. This post is the solution we wish we found when we were looking.
We Want Your Feedback for the Shopify Engineering Blog - Shopify
Hello readers, We’re conducting a survey so we can get a better sense of the stories you’re interested in reading. The survey will take five minutes to complete.
Shopify's Playbook for Scaling Machine Learning - Shopify
Through our experience building our first few models, Shopify Data carved out a pragmatic step-by-step guide that has enabled us to successfully scale machine learning across our organization.
Hydrogen & Tailwind: The Perfect Match for Building Beautiful Storefronts - Shopify
Learn about Tailwind, our preferred way to style websites that enables developers to build beautiful storefronts quickly with Hydrogen, our React-based framework for building custom storefronts.
React Server Components Best Practices You Can Use with Hydrogen - Shopify
A deep dive into the patterns and best practices for React Server Components learned while building Hydrogen, Shopify's React-based framework for building custom storefronts.
Rapid Development with Hydrogen: Building a Product Page - Shopify
Hydrogen's currently in developer preview and I'm excited to show you how you can rapidly build out a simple product page by leaning on Hydrogen's components.
Fixing the Dependency Confusion Vulnerability in 600+ Ruby Apps - Shopify
How Shopify solved the dependency confusion vulnerability in over 600 Ruby applications and created tailored large-scale migration tooling to make it easier.
Cloud, Load, and Modular Code: What 2022 Looks Like for Shopify - Shopify
Shopify CTO Allan Leinwand outlines some of the company's biggest engineering priorities for 2022.
Search at Shopify—Range in Data and Engineering is the Future - Shopify
At Shopify, we draw very few lines between “data” and “engineering” work. Instead we have “search” work.
That Old Certificate Expired and Started an Outage. This is What Happened Next - Shopify
In distributed systems, there’s plenty of occasions for things to go wrong. This is why resiliency and redundancy are important. But no matter the systems you put in place, no matter whether you did or didn’t touch your deployments, issues might arise. It makes it critical to acknowledge the near misses: the situations where something could have gone wrong and the situations where something did, b