---
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

### [Improving the Developer Experience with the Ruby LSP](https://yomu.fyi/post/improving-the-developer-experience-with-the-ruby-lsp.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Feb 24, 2023

The Ruby LSP is a language server intended to improve Ruby’s developer experience by providing editor features through the Language Server Protocol, without typechecking code or requiring type annotations. It targets performance and stability in Shopify’s Core monolith, where it must analyze thousands of files that may themselves contain thousands of lines, and is opinionated toward Ruby on Rails. The article explains LSP’s client-server model, in which editors exchange JSON requests and responses over STDIN and STDOUT, then focuses on nonpositional features such as Folding Range, including document synchronization and parsing. It also outlines future work on parallel request processing, codebase indexing, caching, and a plugin system for framework-specific capabilities such as Rails navigation and model information.


### [The Case Against Monkey Patching, From a Rails Core Team Member](https://yomu.fyi/post/the-case-against-monkey-patching-from-a-rails-core-team-member.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Feb 21, 2023

The post argues that Ruby monkey patches—global changes to existing objects or libraries—should be used sparingly because they are brittle, dangerous, and often unnecessary. They can make Rails and Ruby upgrades harder by depending on private APIs, leave applications exposed to vulnerabilities if security fixes are not mirrored, and accumulate poorly documented technical debt. One Shopify example, activerecord-pedant-adapter, changes Active Record’s MySQL2Adapter so database connections report MySQL query warnings; upstreaming that behavior into Rails allowed the gem to be archived and the patch removed. The recommended alternative is to investigate whether an upgrade or documentation resolves the issue, fix genuine defects upstream, and, when patching is unavoidable, document and test it while maintaining a removal plan.


### [The 25 Percent Rule for Tackling Technical Debt](https://yomu.fyi/post/the-25-percent-rule-for-tackling-technical-debt.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Feb 16, 2023

Technical debt is framed as four categories that need different responses: yearly debt may involve rewrites or gradual replacement, monthly debt requires team-sized planning, weekly debt can become a sprint card, and daily debt is code tidying during ordinary work. The article cautions that some apparent yearly debt reflects growth or changing markets rather than a past mistake, while smaller debt can be deferred only if it is recorded and scheduled. The proposed 25-percent allocation gives 10% to daily improvements, 10% to weekly work, and 5% to planning monthly and yearly debt, with the latter focused on prioritization rather than implementation. Its conclusion is that sustainable remediation depends on team culture: engineers need permission and encouragement to refactor, teams need space to schedule broader work, and leaders need to weigh costs and tradeoffs.


### [ShopifyQL Notebooks: Simplifying Querying with Commerce Data Models](https://yomu.fyi/post/shopifyql-notebooks-simplifying-querying-with-commerce-data-models.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Feb 14, 2023

ShopifyQL Notebooks gives merchants a self-serve way to investigate changing business metrics, understand their causes, and share findings as data stories. It combines the ShopifyQL query language with commerce-specific data models designed for users without SQL expertise, covering domains such as products, orders, and customers. The modeling process starts with business questions, translates them into columns and an appropriate grain, validates the design with mock data and queries, and evaluates upstream data, freshness, and performance. To support large merchants, the implementation uses incremental models and roll-ups, which can reduce build and query times while adding maintenance, pipeline, and monitoring complexity.


### [Bringing Javascript to WebAssembly for Shopify Functions](https://yomu.fyi/post/bringing-javascript-to-webassembly-for-shopify-functions.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Feb 9, 2023

Shopify is introducing a Local Developer Preview that lets developers run JavaScript Shopify Functions locally, alongside Rust, while production deployment remains unavailable. Shopify Functions execute as WASI modules that read JSON from stdin and write JSON to stdout, with a 256KB size limit and a five-millisecond runtime limit; the post notes that the timing constraint varies by machine load. Javy addresses JavaScript’s WebAssembly runtime challenge by bundling the QuickJS interpreter into a Wasm binary, using Rust wrappers and Wizer to snapshot compiled QuickJS bytecode. Initial tests found Javy-created modules about three times slower than equivalent Rust modules, but both are likely to stay under five milliseconds for realistic use cases; Shopify is also pursuing SpiderMonkey in Wasm and researching JIT support for future performance.


### [The Complex Data Models Behind Shopify's Tax Insights Feature](https://yomu.fyi/post/the-complex-data-models-behind-shopify-s-tax-insights-feature.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Feb 8, 2023

Shopify Tax’s Tax Insights feature provides merchants with state-level information about sales-tax liability and approaching liability, amid U.S. rules that vary by jurisdiction, product, threshold, and evaluation period. The implementation modified existing data models, added four new ones, and represented changing tax rules with lookup data containing valid\_from and valid\_to dates, including thresholds, date ranges, inclusions, exclusions, and inclusive or exclusive comparisons. Teams prototyped models in BigQuery SQL, implemented them in PySpark and Spark jobs, and combined merchant monthly taxable-sales aggregates with the rule model to evaluate economic nexus; the architecture moved source data through GCS and a warehouse into a final model. Each run publishes merchant-keyed insights to Google Cloud Bigtable, where the core application retrieves them for the frontend, while warehouse data supports analytics and other processes.


### [The Hardest Part of Writing Tests is Getting Started](https://yomu.fyi/post/the-hardest-part-of-writing-tests-is-getting-started.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Feb 2, 2023

The article presents getting started with automated testing as the main obstacle, especially when a full suite requires helper tools, stubs, and fixtures that can overwhelm beginners. It argues that tests serve as executable documentation, preserve intended behavior and edge cases, and expose regressions before changes reach production. The recommended progression is to install a framework and verify both passing and failing tests, cover isolated functions, add stubs with sanitized API-response fixtures, and then build end-to-end tests while monitoring coverage. In an ETL example, API stubbing avoided expensive, slow calls, while database checks validated loaded and transformed data; the resulting tests covered more than 80 percent of the codebase and saved time for the author and team. The article also proposes E2E tests as a way to safely approach legacy code before refactoring it.


### [Performance Testing At Scale—for BFCM and Beyond](https://yomu.fyi/post/performance-testing-at-scale-for-bfcm-and-beyond.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Jan 27, 2023

Shopify treats Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) as its most critical period, and uses full-scale BFCM Scale Testing to assess whether the platform can handle peak traffic. Preparation combines capacity planning, resiliency testing, single-application performance testing, and repeated exercises that scale core services to their BFCM profiles before generating load. The hybrid architecture centers on Shopify Core, a monolithic Ruby application supported by services for storefront rendering, analytics, fraud analysis, payments, webhooks, and more. Five load flows cover browsing and buying, admin activity, flash sales, Storefront APIs, and Hydrogen and Oxygen, with Cronograma layering requests gradually and providing an abort switch. The exercises surfaced connection-count pressures, a Kubernetes ingress-nginx endpoint limit, and uneven load-balancer distribution; mitigations included refactoring, scaling dependent services, increasing pod capacity, and dedicated nginx node pools.


### [From Farmer to Security Engineer: How Dev Degree Helped Me Find My Dream Job](https://yomu.fyi/post/from-farmer-to-security-engineer-how-dev-degree-helped-me-find-my-drea.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Jan 26, 2023

Cailyn Edwards recounts how she moved from leaving high school and running an organic farm to a career in infrastructure security through Shopify’s Dev Degree program. Before entering the program, she completed a horticulture co-diploma, finished high school and the required math courses, and pursued computer science while needing to pay her mortgage and maintain work-life balance. Dev Degree’s training path and rotating placements exposed her to computer science fundamentals, pair programming, Ruby on Rails on the orders team, infrastructure security, and network foundations, leading her to discover a strong interest in cyber security and cloud infrastructure. After graduating in September 2021, she joined Infrastructure Security full-time and later reports projects, internal security talks, a promotion to Senior Infrastructure Engineer, and Kubernetes contributions including a contributor award.


### [Making Your React Native Gestures Feel Natural](https://yomu.fyi/post/making-your-react-native-gestures-feel-natural.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Jan 20, 2023

The post describes techniques for making draggable elements in a React Native Sheet component feel more natural during open-and-close gestures. A gesture handler updates yPosition as the user’s finger moves, then chooses an open or closed destination when the drag ends, but a position-only decision can ignore a fast flick and a fixed 600 ms animation ignores distance. The revised interaction adds event.velocityY, weighted by a multiplier, to the destination decision and uses withSpring so distance and release velocity affect the animation. It also divides overdrag distance when the Sheet is already open, creating resistance that communicates the boundary, and reports that flicks become easier while movement feels more realistic; the examples are ultimately recommended for testing on a real device.


### [Ruby 3.2’s YJIT is Production-Ready](https://yomu.fyi/post/ruby-3-2-s-yjit-is-production-ready.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Jan 17, 2023

Ruby 3.2 makes YJIT, Shopify’s just-in-time compiler for CRuby, substantially more suitable for production after its experimental Ruby 3.1 release. The project was ported from C99 to Rust for stronger safety guarantees and better abstractions, while memory work reduced overhead to approximately one third of the Ruby 3.1 level through metadata optimization, machine-code garbage collection, and lazy page allocation. YJIT 3.2 speeds railsbench by about 38% over the Ruby 3.2 interpreter, or 57% over the Ruby 3.1.3 interpreter, and adds native ARM64 support for Apple M1/M2, AWS Graviton, and Raspberry Pi. Shopify has deployed it across its Storefront Renderer infrastructure, measuring real-world speedups of 5% to 10%, while identifying memory footprint and method-call optimization as continuing priorities.


### [How Good Documentation Can Improve Productivity](https://yomu.fyi/post/how-good-documentation-can-improve-productivity.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Jan 12, 2023

Internal documentation is presented as a productivity and scaling tool for engineering organizations, especially as people move between teams, projects, or companies and remote work makes writing a default channel for knowledge sharing. Shopify’s approach combines standardized writing practices with three primary locations: Markdown microsites built with Docusaurus, internal GitHub for issues, READMEs, setup guidance, and searchable code, and the Vault, a GitHub- and Markdown-powered source of contextual information. The article argues that documentation should be treated as a product: it should be searchable, user-friendly, kept fresh, integrated into CI/CD, and hosted where engineers already work. It also recommends making writing routine through small contributions, paired writing, peer review, and audience-aware context, concluding that accessible documentation speeds onboarding, reduces duplicated problem-solving, supports asynchronous and cross-team collaboration, and improves developer literacy.


### [From Ruby to Node: Overhauling Shopify’s CLI for a Better Developer Experience](https://yomu.fyi/post/from-ruby-to-node-overhauling-shopify-s-cli-for-a-better-developer-exp.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Jan 10, 2023

Shopify rewrote its unified CLI from Ruby to TypeScript running on Node after growing dependencies on Node tooling, Hydrogen’s preference for npm-managed dependencies, and a broader fit with web technologies. The rewrite aims to reduce system requirements, improve terminal consistency, and make contribution easier, while using a modular architecture of domain NPM packages built on @shopify/cli-kit. The team established shared code, UI, convention, and principle foundations, addressed cross-OS support, used TypeScript for stronger contracts, and applied Cucumber for end-to-end testing. The Node CLI unified and streamlined app development and added extensibility such as functions, but Theme commands still use Ruby and removing that dependency remains future work.


### [Reliving Your Happiest HTTP Interactions with Ruby’s VCR Gem](https://yomu.fyi/post/reliving-your-happiest-http-interactions-with-ruby-s-vcr-gem.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Jan 5, 2023

Ruby’s VCR library records HTTP interactions and replays them in test suites, verifying requests and returning predictable responses; the post presents it as a way to manage complex WebMock stubs and multi-step or unreliable API behavior. It contrasts recordings from a live API with manually authored stubs: cassettes preserve observed behavior at recording time but are harder to change and do not update when the API changes. The guidance covers VCR.use\_cassette, configurable request matching, YAML cassettes, before\_filter logging, filter\_sensitive\_data, and safer recording modes such as :once and :none instead of :new\_episodes. It recommends VCR for integration-focused tests involving unpredictable sequences, multiple calls, or troublesome APIs, while favoring WebMock or decomposition for simple calls and specific states; cassette isolation and inspection add debugging value but can hide interactions.


### [Monte Carlo Simulations: Separating Signal from Noise in Sampled Success Metrics](https://yomu.fyi/post/monte-carlo-simulations-separating-signal-from-noise-in-sampled-succes.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Jan 3, 2023

Sampled success metrics can be difficult to interpret when the underlying population is too expensive or time-consuming to measure completely. The method presents a Monte Carlo simulation for estimating how sample size and an assumed trend affect the reliability of Shopify’s sampled “shop issue rate,” which estimates requirement violations for an average installed app. Its workflow establishes simulation metrics such as 1mDO, 2mDO, and 1qDO, measures MAPE, defines a sampling distribution, and runs repeated simulations across parameter combinations using Python and pandas. For the example, the issue count is modeled with a Poisson distribution, while sample size, lambda, and monthly decrease are varied to quantify uncertainty and collection cost. With 100 audits per month, an initial mean of 10 issues, and a 5-percent monthly decrease, the simulations predict monthly decreases 83 percent of the time and decreases over two months 97 percent of the time.


### [React Native Skia: A Year in Review and a Look Ahead](https://yomu.fyi/post/react-native-skia-a-year-in-review-and-a-look-ahead.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Dec 29, 2022

React Native Skia’s first year produced an initial alpha and 89 additional releases, evolving a React Renderer and Skia integration for declarative 2D graphics across iOS, Android, the Web, and Node.js testing. The project changed direction after identifying two bottlenecks: dependence on the JavaScript thread and the overhead of thousands of JSI allocations in large drawings. Skia DOM addresses them with a declarative drawing state that recomputes only necessary changes and executes drawings on the UI thread, with C++ implementations on iOS and Android and a JavaScript implementation on React Native Web. CanvasKit compatibility, Expo integration, Metal on iOS, and OpenGL on Android and the Web support the cross-platform design, while extension points enable modules such as Skottie and camera-frame effects. The library’s tests compare rendered examples across platforms, and planned work includes JavaScript-worklet and Reanimated animation integration plus advanced text layouts through Skia’s paragraph module.


### [Migrating our Largest Mobile App to React Native](https://yomu.fyi/post/migrating-our-largest-mobile-app-to-react-native.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Dec 27, 2022

Shopify’s largest mobile app, Shopify Mobile, had 300 screens per platform and more than six years of development, making a full rewrite impractical because it could take at least three years and halt feature work. The team first adopted React Native incrementally, but migration was projected to take four to five years while requiring three design-system implementations, three architectures, and costly native interoperability. It then switched to “Iterative Porting”: engineers were trained through the five-milestone RN Accelerator, surfaces were inventoried and prioritized with a RICE-based score, and eligible features were migrated behind flags, tested, monitored for two weeks, then completed by removing the native version. The effort also introduced Native Routes, modal deeplink handling on iOS, and component-level Safe Area fixes; with root screens ported and infrastructure in place, the team reports that ports are accelerating, although substantial work remains.


### [Optimizing Ruby’s Memory Layout: Variable Width Allocation](https://yomu.fyi/post/optimizing-ruby-s-memory-layout-variable-width-allocation.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Dec 25, 2022

CRuby’s original garbage collector stores most Ruby objects in fixed 40-byte RVALUE slots, leaving differently sized data partly unused or forcing additional allocations through malloc. Shopify’s Variable Width Allocation project adds dynamic-sized allocation APIs and five fixed-size pools—40, 80, 160, 320, and 640 bytes—while increasing heap pages from 16 KB to 64 KB. The design targets cache locality, malloc overhead, memory utilization, and future garbage-collector experimentation; a new GC.stat\_heap API reports size-pool statistics, and an escape hatch can disable the feature at build time on Ruby 3.2. Benchmarks on development Ruby 3.2.0 showed gains in most workloads, including 9.8% for psych-load, 5.3% for hexapdf, and 2.1% for railsbench, while mail was 1.7% slower.


### [Year in Review 2022: Tenderlove's Ruby and Rails Reflections and Predictions](https://yomu.fyi/post/year-in-review-2022-tenderlove-s-ruby-and-rails-reflections-and-predic.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Dec 22, 2022

Aaron Patterson’s 2022 review surveys developments in Ruby and Rails, pairing runtime performance work with tools intended to improve developer productivity. YJIT’s compiler was rewritten in Rust, enabling ARM and Apple Silicon support while producing faster machine code; Variable Width Allocation adjusts object slot sizes to keep instance variables embedded and improve data locality. Ruby 3.2’s Object Shapes use property order as a class-independent inline-cache key, while Ruby LSP adds editor services and Error Highlight adds column-level diagnostics that now appear on Rails error pages. Patterson predicts—more accurately, hopes—that languages, frameworks, and development environments will become more interconnected, providing better suggestions, context, and assistance so developers can spend less time coding and more time solving problems.


### [Automatically Rotating GitHub Tokens (So You Don’t Have To)](https://yomu.fyi/post/automatically-rotating-github-tokens-so-you-don-t-have-to.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Dec 20, 2022

Shopify needed automated GitHub workflows that could clone from private repositories, update organization-level projects, and trigger downstream workflows but could not use GITHUB\_TOKEN. Personal access tokens supplied those capabilities, yet introduced developer churn, user-attributed actions, and no organization-enforced rotation or expiry. The proposed system uses GitHub Actions and a GitHub App to generate repository secrets that rotate automatically while preserving PAT-like references in existing workflows. Its serverless design delegates scheduling, managed infrastructure, approvals, secret management, auditing, and break-glass operation to GitHub, while a custom TypeScript action encrypts and writes generated secrets. Prototyping exposed that parallel one-second jobs could accrue multiple billable minutes, prompting sequential execution in a consolidated workflow; the stated goal is improved resilience to developer churn and reduced leaked-secret blast radius.


[Newer posts](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify/page/3.md) · [Older posts](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify/page/5.md)