---
title: "Shopify"
description: "Global commerce platform powering millions of businesses with essential infrastructure and innovative engineering solutions."
---

# Shopify
> Global commerce platform powering millions of businesses with essential infrastructure and innovative engineering solutions.

## Articles

### [Building a Real-time Buyer Signal Data Pipeline for Shopify Inbox](https://yomu.fyi/post/building-a-real-time-buyer-signal-data-pipeline-for-shopify-inbox.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Dec 13, 2021

Shopify built a real-time buyer-signal pipeline for Shopify Inbox after noting that 70 percent of its conversations involved customers making a purchasing decision. The system surfaces cart actions and order-completion information as chronological conversation events, covering events from up to 14 days before a conversation and post-conversation events while its seven-day lifecycle remains active. It uses Kafka through Monorail and Change Data Capture, Apache Beam on Google Cloud Dataflow, filtering jobs for mission-critical transactional events, and stateful aggregation with timers and a Global Window to retain buyer activity. In an equal-group A/B test, buyer signals increased merchant response rate by two percentage points and attributed conversion rate by 0.7 percentage points, while response time showed no significant change.


### [Scaling Shopify's BFCM Live Map: An Apache Flink Redesign](https://yomu.fyi/post/scaling-shopify-s-bfcm-live-map-an-apache-flink-redesign.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Dec 10, 2021

Shopify’s 2021 BFCM live map had to scale from more than 1.7 million merchants while adding product trends and unique shoppers, after the prior Cricket-and-Redis backend showed volume and delivery weaknesses. The redesign placed Apache Flink on the critical path to filter irrelevant checkout events, reducing Cricket’s workload to about one percent of event volume, while cross-region sharding and active-active deployment supported availability. Flink computed new metrics, including 500 product categories ranked by sales-volume change every five minutes, while Cricket retained existing metric computation and deduplication. In load tests, the pipeline handled 1 million checkout events per second, and its jobs ran at 100 percent uptime during BFCM without backpressure or manual intervention. Redis still caused high CPU and memory pressure, producing brief arc-visual errors for a small sample of users, so Shopify plans a simpler Flink-centered design.


### [Upgrading MySQL at Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/post/upgrading-mysql-at-shopify.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Dec 2, 2021

In September 2021, Shopify completed its cutover from Percona Server 5.7.21 to 5.7.32 across a MySQL fleet spanning hundreds of horizontally sharded databases and thousands of virtual machines. The upgrade targeted replication improvements from transaction writesets, along with security and stability fixes, while avoiding the larger risks of a major-version change. The Database Platform team extended Mason into a declarative topology system and used Chef roles to provision upgraded VMs, restore backups, run mysql\_upgrade when required, configure replication, and populate replacement topologies. Extensive rollback testing exposed a critical downgrade bug; after patching 5.7.21, Shopify proceeded in staggered batches beginning August 25 and completed the final shards on September 7, while documenting a repeatable process intended to make future upgrades faster and safer.


### [Remote rendering: Shopify’s take on extensible UI](https://yomu.fyi/post/remote-rendering-shopify-s-take-on-extensible-ui.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Dec 1, 2021

Shopify describes a UI extension architecture designed to give third-party code consistent, accessible, cross-platform experiences without allowing it to compromise the host application. Its remote-rendering approach separates UI definition from rendering, with extensions communicating with hosts through MessageChannel-based message passing; hosts are implemented in JavaScript, Kotlin, and Swift. The open-source remote-ui library supplies RPC for passing callbacks across postMessage, automatic memory management, a DOM-like RemoteRoot that serializes updates as JSON, and receivers that map remote components to DOM or React components. A sandbox isolates untrusted extension code and controls exposed APIs across web workers, Android web views, and iOS JsCore. The system powers product-subscription and post-purchase extensions, while a DOM-based version began releasing in July 2025.


### [Building an App Clip with React Native](https://yomu.fyi/post/building-an-app-clip-with-react-native.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Nov 26, 2021

The Shop team built an iOS App Clip to reduce the drop-off between a buyer’s checkout thank-you page and opening the full Shop app, where App Store download and onboarding added friction. App Clips are invoked through actions such as QR scans, links, or Smart App Banners and must stay below 10MB, while the team wanted React Native support for order tracking and related functionality. A Hello World build initially measured 28MB; explicitly selecting native dependencies in the Podfile reduced the baseline to 4.3MB, and a scrappy feature build reached 6.5MB. The team used early testing, invocation URL handling through React Native Linking, and shared data containers for app upgrades, ultimately releasing an App Clip at 9.1MB; extensive code sharing proved too complex and some code was copied.


### [Five Tips for Growing Your Engineering Career](https://yomu.fyi/post/five-tips-for-growing-your-engineering-career.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Nov 25, 2021

Early-career engineers may struggle to learn and grow while adapting to a new job, especially when time and energy are limited. The guidance recommends identifying knowledge gaps, pairing with teammates, and learning by contributing to unfamiliar project areas, then taking ownership of a defined component through completion, technical decisions, and communication. It also emphasizes teaching and documenting what was learned, tracking accomplishments in a “brag document,” sharing progress with leads and colleagues, and mentoring interns or others to build leadership skills. The author frames growth as intentional “own your own development,” supported by a professional development plan, and gives personal examples including closing gaps in React, Redux, and GraphQL, contributing to technical designs, and giving talks.


### [Using Propensity Score Matching to Uncover Shopify Capital’s Effect on Business Growth](https://yomu.fyi/post/using-propensity-score-matching-to-uncover-shopify-capital-s-effect-on.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Nov 11, 2021

Shopify’s data team sought to estimate whether accepting Shopify Capital for the first time increased merchants’ subsequent sales, without randomly denying funding in an A/B test. They compared US first-time adopters in January 2019 with Canadian shops that later pre-qualified for Capital, using propensity scores built from Shopify sales and performance characteristics and matching them with a caliper-based greedy nearest-neighbor algorithm. After matching about 600 treated shops against roughly 8,000 controls, they evaluated log-transformed cumulative GMV from February through July 2019 with a binary regression and checked balance using standardized mean differences, visual comparisons, and variance ratios. The estimated geometric-average GMV was 36% higher for US merchants, with a 95% confidence interval of 13% to 65%; robustness checks supported a positive treatment effect.


### [Building Blocks of High Performance Hydrogen-powered Storefronts](https://yomu.fyi/post/building-blocks-of-high-performance-hydrogen-powered-storefronts.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Nov 8, 2021

Hydrogen is a React-based framework for custom Shopify storefronts, designed to balance fast loading, personalized and dynamic commerce, and developer experience. The central trade-off is that static generation and edge delivery can speed loading but defer personalization, while conventional server-side rendering can slow time-to-first-byte as data is fetched. Hydrogen addresses this with React 18 alpha streaming SSR powered by Suspense, which streams the page shell before data resolves and progressively hydrates components without extra client round trips. React Server Components keep server-only code out of bundles, support server-side data access, and enable component-level updates that preserve client state. Built-in fetching and configurable caching, including stale-while-revalidate, work with Oxygen’s colocated runtime, while developers can mix server rendering, client fetching, and edge delivery at page or component level.


### [The Vitality of Core Web Vitals](https://yomu.fyi/post/the-vitality-of-core-web-vitals.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Nov 4, 2021

Core Web Vitals were introduced by Google in 2020 as unified guidance for web UX, and their loading, interactivity, and visual stability metrics became one factor in ranking systems after rollout from mid-June through the end of August 2021. The article explains LCP, FID, and CLS, including how LCP identifies the largest visible element, FID measures delay before the browser responds to a first interaction, and CLS sums unexpected layout shifts. It gives good and poor thresholds of 2.5 seconds and 4 seconds for LCP, 100 milliseconds and 300 milliseconds for FID, and 0.1 and 0.25 for CLS, with intermediate scores needing improvement. Recommended improvements include updating dependencies and tree-shaking unused library code, preloading critical assets, improving server response time, lazy-loading below-the-fold content, compressing images, and reserving image space to prevent shifts.


### [Always on Calibration with a Quarterly Summary](https://yomu.fyi/post/always-on-calibration-with-a-quarterly-summary.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Nov 2, 2021

Annual or infrequent performance reviews can create surprises, incomplete records of contributions, recency bias, and missed opportunities for timely feedback, correction, and career growth. The proposed alternative is “always-on” calibration, which treats individual development like continuous deployment: managers and team members repeatedly align expectations, discuss impact, and identify just-in-time opportunities. Each quarter, team members create a living document with intended outcomes, top and other accomplishments, upcoming opportunities, coworker feedback, and a quarterly review connecting impact to organizational expectations for role and level. They align on outcomes at the quarter’s first one-on-one and update accomplishments and feedback weekly before subsequent one-on-ones. Quarterly rollups provide smaller contribution snapshots, enable performance ratings and earlier course correction, and distinguish missed personal-development outcomes from missed role or level expectations.


### [The AWARE Development Plan](https://yomu.fyi/post/the-aware-development-plan.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Oct 28, 2021

The AWARE Development Plan presents a structured way to pursue long-term goals in software development, education, dance, or other areas of interest. David Ward developed it after seeing team members struggle to define their growth paths and describes using a similar process for his own goals. AWARE stands for Aim, Work Back, Achieve, Reflect, and Encore: define the desired outcome, work backward into smaller aims, execute measurable objectives, learn from the result, and maintain the plan. Short- and medium-term aims act as checkpoints, allowing people to identify missing experience, seek opportunities, and course-correct. Ward recommends reviewing the plan with a lead or manager, including during weekly one-on-ones, to select next steps, connect opportunities to aims, and ensure completed aims are reflected on.


### [Shopify's Path to a Faster Trino Query Execution: Custom Verification, Benchmarking, and Profiling Tooling](https://yomu.fyi/post/shopify-s-path-to-a-faster-trino-query-execution-custom-verification-b.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Oct 27, 2021

Shopify needed safer ways to evaluate Trino configuration changes and software upgrades as its forked, hundreds-node cluster handled more data and data scientists depended on fast queries. The Data Reliability team built a lightweight Python library that centralizes Trino query orchestration, then exposed it through PyTest fixtures for repeatable verification, including correctness checks and candidate-versus-control comparisons. The broader framework also supports benchmarking and profiling concepts such as replaying historical queries, reproducing traffic patterns, and testing autoscaling, although the project ultimately focused most of its performance-testing scope on verification. Extensive correctness tests helped the Data Foundations team complete a successful Trino upgrade, while p95 query execution time remained stable over the reported period; the library was designed to leave room for more advanced interfaces later.


### [Debugging Systems in the Cloud: MySQL, Kubernetes, and Cgroups](https://yomu.fyi/post/debugging-systems-in-the-cloud-mysql-kubernetes-and-cgroups.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Oct 21, 2021

KateSQL, Shopify’s Database-as-a-Service platform on GKE, investigated why otherwise comparable MySQL Pods took between 10 and 30 minutes to be created during instance replacement. Measurements found extreme differences for Pods with identical resources and datasets: one required 2,120 seconds for initialization and 1,104 seconds for startup, while another took 74 and 17 seconds, respectively; affected Pods also accumulated more slow queries involving temporary memory tables. Profiling showed InnoDB’s single-threaded buffer pool initialization spending substantial time in mmap calls and the Linux memory cgroup function mem\_cgroup\_commit\_charge, while affected nodes had roughly 50,000 memory cgroups. The team linked the slowdown to a Linux kernel cgroup memory leak and slab reparenting behavior, then improved performance through node replacement, memory.force\_empty testing, and GKE 1.18 upgrades with relevant fixes.


### [GitHub Does My Operations Homework: A Ruby Speed Story](https://yomu.fyi/post/github-does-my-operations-homework-a-ruby-speed-story.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Oct 19, 2021

YJIT’s benchmarking site combines open-source benchmark runners with Jekyll, GitHub Pages, and GitHub Actions to publish frequently refreshed results. The author wanted to compare Ruby configurations, expand reporting beyond console output, and avoid recurring operational work. Benchmarks run on an AWS instance rather than in GitHub Actions, while Actions schedules jobs, uses repository secrets for SSH, and commits generated data back to the repository; Jekyll builds the Pages site from that data. Reports include D3.js and Ruby-generated SVG graphs, tables, textual summaries, and JSON tripwire data that can trigger an issue when performance drops too far. The reported results show YJIT 20.6% faster than interpreted CRuby and 17.4% faster than MJIT, with Railsbench gains of 18.5% and 21.0% respectively.


### [Try Out YJIT for Faster Rubying](https://yomu.fyi/post/try-out-yjit-for-faster-rubying.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Oct 15, 2021

YJIT is Shopify’s just-in-time compiler for CRuby, designed to convert frequently used code into optimized native machine code. Early results include a 20% or more improvement on a simple hello, world Rails benchmark, while production-app benchmarking and one real web service showed about a 6% speedup on a small percentage of traffic. The guide covers building a YJIT-enabled Ruby from source with Autoconf, make, OpenSSL, and GCC or Clang, then switching to it with a Ruby version manager and enabling YJIT explicitly. It shows how to verify installation, compare test and benchmark runs, and collect runtime statistics about generated code, compiled ISEQs, and interpreter versus YJIT instruction execution. The implementation ran Shopify’s full unit tests, similar GitHub tests, and limited production traffic, but remains in progress and invites issue reports about crashes, errors, and speed.


### [YJIT: Building a New JIT Compiler for CRuby](https://yomu.fyi/post/yjit-building-a-new-jit-compiler-for-cruby.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Oct 14, 2021

YJIT is a new just-in-time compiler being built inside CRuby to improve Ruby performance on modern hardware, where single-core speed gains are limited and energy efficiency matters. Unlike MJIT’s weaker results on large real-world applications, YJIT uses a data-driven focus on performance hotspots in Rails and Shopify Core and is based on Basic Block Versioning (BBV). After about one year, it reports speedups over the CRuby interpreter of 20% on railsbench, 39% on liquid template rendering, and 37% on activerecord, with near-peak performance after one benchmark iteration. YJIT passes CRuby’s roughly 30,000-test suite, Shopify Core and GitHub backend CI, while running on a small percentage of Shopify production servers; its team plans further CRuby changes and broader JIT coverage before and after its intended Ruby 3.1 integration.


### [Winning AI4TSP: Solving the Travelling Salesperson Problem with Self-programming Machines](https://yomu.fyi/post/winning-ai4tsp-solving-the-travelling-salesperson-problem-with-self-pr.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Oct 6, 2021

The 2021 AI4TSP Competition addressed the Travelling Salesperson Problem when travel times are sampled from probability distributions and locations carry rewards and time windows. With n locations, the number of possible tours is n!, making exhaustive enumeration impractical, while the competition also required decisions under uncertain travel outcomes. One track required a fixed tour optimized for expected performance across scenarios; the other allowed an adaptive policy to select the next location as time elapsed, with results evaluated across many instances and realizations. The Shopify-led team used dialectic search for the fixed-tour track and deep reinforcement learning for the on-the-fly track, and won first prize in both.


### [Journey Through a Dev Degree Intern’s First Placement](https://yomu.fyi/post/journey-through-a-dev-degree-intern-s-first-placement.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Oct 1, 2021

During her first 12-month Dev Degree placement, the author worked as a back-end developer on Shopify’s Docs & API Libraries team, which builds libraries, tools, and documentation for developers. She describes an initially steep learning curve through work on Shopify CLI, including a change allowing Rails flags such as --db=DB during project scaffolding, and a Shopify Admin API Library for Node written in TypeScript. To handle uncertainty, she kept an Achievement Log, learned by adapting existing code and tests, paired with colleagues, asked for help, and reviewed draft pull requests with teammates. The placement challenged stereotypes about “real” developers and showed that imposter syndrome can coexist with genuinely needing more knowledge. She concludes that learning is collaborative, representation can strengthen inclusion, and becoming comfortable with discomfort is part of development.


### [Reusing Code with React Native Packages at Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/post/reusing-code-with-react-native-packages-at-shopify.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Sep 29, 2021

Shopify’s React Native teams needed to reuse shared functionality across Shop, Inbox, Point of Sale, Shopify Mobile, and Local Delivery without requiring each team to build and maintain separate package infrastructure. The React Native Foundations team chose a monorepo containing npm packages, a fixture app, shared root configuration, generated CI, and an internal documentation site, with code generation for package bootstrapping. Packages use TypeScript project references, Yarn Workspaces, Lerna publishing, and custom Babel, Metro, and Podfile configuration to support cross-package references, hot reload, and local native dependencies. Dependency graphs and file-change triggers limit CI work to affected packages and dependents, while independent versioning and release scripts manage publication; since June 2020, 17 packages have been developed, including 10 contributed by product teams, although release automation and coordination across multiple monorepos remain future improvements.


### [Shard Balancing: Moving Shops Confidently with Zero-Downtime at Terabyte-scale](https://yomu.fyi/post/shard-balancing-moving-shops-confidently-with-zero-downtime-at-terabyt.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Sep 24, 2021

Shopify’s MySQL shards can become unevenly utilized as merchants grow after being assigned to arbitrary shards, increasing over-utilization risk while leaving other capacity underused. The post describes a strategy for selecting shop placements using historical utilization and traffic data, simulations, and potentially other metrics such as shop size, GMV, and move time. It then explains online shop migration with Ghostferry, which batch-copies records and tails MySQL’s binary log before a brief cutover updates the routing table and directs new writes to the target pod. Verification checks data completeness, integrity, and stale traffic before old data is pruned; the migration system’s central algorithm is also represented in a TLA+ formal specification. The stated outcome is a more balanced infrastructure that can isolate high-traffic merchants across pods with virtually zero consumer-facing downtime.


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