---
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

### [How to Write Code Without Having to Read It](https://yomu.fyi/post/how-to-write-code-without-having-to-read-it.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Oct 11, 2022

The article argues that developers can minimize code reading when fixing bugs or changing features by focusing on information not already checked by tools. It recommends locating a user-visible entrypoint, then making a deliberately breaking edit and climbing the callstack through build errors rather than reading each caller. Strict types, tagged unions, exhaustive switches, linters, and unit tests expose incompatible inputs, missing cases, deprecated patterns, and affected consumers; pure functions separated from side-effect code keep tests simple and informative. After the tooling-driven passes, developers manually confirm behavior, revisiting the design when runtime issues remain and making future changes more "unread"-able.


### [The Engineering Story Behind Flex Comp](https://yomu.fyi/post/the-engineering-story-behind-flex-comp.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Oct 5, 2022

Shopify’s Flex Comp lets employees allocate total rewards among base salary, Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), and Stock Options, with allocation changes during windows and no one-year equity cliffs. Building the system required a prioritized backlog, cross-functional teams, early API contracts, and privacy controls around its code and data. For sensitive analytics events, the team encrypted entire Kafka payloads with RSA, using 4096-bit keys for ordinary events and 6144-bit keys for larger payloads, while later identifying hybrid encryption as a better design. On the frontend, typed hooks, mocked data, and artificial delays allowed business logic and interface work to proceed in parallel while contracts evolved. Version one shipped to Shopify’s employees, with documented technical and design debt and future decisions retained for subsequent iterations.


### [Safely Adding NOT NULL Columns to Your Database Tables](https://yomu.fyi/post/safely-adding-not-null-columns-to-your-database-tables.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Oct 4, 2022

Shopify’s Database Migrations team investigated whether Large Hadron Migrator (LHM) can safely add NOT NULL columns to existing MySQL tables with minimal downtime. LHM creates a shadow table, installs triggers for INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE operations, and copies records in batches before renaming the tables. The experiments varied whether the new column had a DEFAULT value or UNIQUE index and whether MySQL used strict or non-strict mode, evaluating trigger compatibility and record counts. A NOT NULL column with a DEFAULT was backward compatible, but adding a UNIQUE index could cause data loss; without a DEFAULT, strict mode broke compatibility while non-strict mode used implicit defaults, which may be undesirable.


### [A Software Engineer’s Guide to Giving Feedback that Actually Matters](https://yomu.fyi/post/a-software-engineer-s-guide-to-giving-feedback-that-actually-matters.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Sep 30, 2022

The post presents feedback as a professional tool that can either support growth and collaboration or fuel ego-driven competition. It focuses first on pull request reviews, where engineers should prioritize critical code and logic over stylistic nitpicks, use linters or pre-commit hooks for uniform formatting, and frame comments to preserve a two-way educational dynamic. Recommended practices include discussing team review processes, explaining feedback goals, drafting messages before sending, reinforcing strengths, asking questions, separating behavior from identity, and making comments specific and timely. For broader workplace issues, the post advises asking whether feedback must be said, by the speaker, and immediately, then using considerate timing and SMART framing to improve the chance that it will be heard and produce change.


### [A Flexible Framework for Effective Pair Programming](https://yomu.fyi/post/a-flexible-framework-for-effective-pair-programming.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Sep 27, 2022

Pair programming is presented as a mentoring and onboarding tool for early-career developers in Shopify’s Dev Degree program, where interns use it to build technical and communication skills. The author created a flexible framework to address progress tracking, session goals, a safe space, and communication, then refined it through an interactive RenderATL workshop with more than 30 attendees. The framework lets pairs choose roles, structure, agenda, environment, and communication practices; one described style assigns a driver to type and explain thought processes while a navigator reviews, observes, and suggests edge cases or refactorings, with frequent role switches. It also warns against hostile, passive-aggressive, and overly absolute language, and the pilot received positive intern feedback for supporting learning goals in a flexible format while continuing to evolve.


### [Lessons From Building iOS Widgets](https://yomu.fyi/post/lessons-from-building-ios-widgets.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Sep 22, 2022

Shopify’s widget team describes a third-generation redesign for iOS and Android after the original iOS widgets offered only two metrics and consumed substantial space. The widgets target merchants who need fresh shop analytics, using native SwiftUI on iOS because WidgetKit extensions have memory constraints, serialize SwiftUI view hierarchies to disk, and lacked official React Native support. Independent widget-side fetching uses shared session-management code and tokens; repeated update callbacks caused duplicate network requests and token-refresh races, so the team introduced a short-lived, widget-specific cache. Replacing existing widgets also exposed migration limits: changing widget kind identifiers could blank or remove installed widgets, leading Shopify to deprecate old widgets while releasing new ones and guide merchants through the transition. The team planned further customization and integration with iOS 16 features, including watch and lock-screen complications and live activities.


### [Lessons From Building Android Widgets](https://yomu.fyi/post/lessons-from-building-android-widgets.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Sep 22, 2022

Shopify revisited its Android widgets alongside an iOS widget effort, aiming to give merchants faster access to frequently changing business metrics. The team chose native Android development because React Native lacked official RemoteViews support, while widget configuration data was persisted with shared preferences and used to build requests. Because Android could invoke onUpdate() multiple times per cycle, they added a one-minute, short-lived cache keyed by widgetID and mindful of configuration such as locale. This reduced redundant network calls, system load, and incorrect analytics, while the widget rollout also exposed migration limitations between old fixed-size widgets and new space-responsive ones, leading Shopify to deprecate the old widgets rather than transform them.


### [What is a Full Stack Data Scientist?](https://yomu.fyi/post/what-is-a-full-stack-data-scientist.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Sep 15, 2022

Shopify defines full stack data science as an ownership-oriented, end-to-end approach to solving business problems across the data science lifecycle. Rather than specializing in one stage, practitioners participate in discovery and analysis, acquisition, data modeling, pipeline development, and production delivery. The role combines business acumen, communication, Python and SQL programming, exploratory data analysis, data engineering, and machine learning, while treating machine learning as a tool rather than a default and starting simple before adding complexity. Shopify describes the model as generalist with T-shaped development: broad capability is paired with deeper expertise in a specific area, enabling individual strengths within teams to address complex challenges.


### [Managing React Form State Using the React-Form Library](https://yomu.fyi/post/managing-react-form-state-using-the-react-form-library.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Sep 14, 2022

Shopify’s tutorial shows how to manage a React product form with the open-source react-form library from its Quilt repository. It replaces component-level useState and earlier input and submit handlers with the useForm and useField hooks, which provide form and field state, event handlers, submission, reset, and dirty tracking. The example connects each TextField to its corresponding fields entry, using its value and onChange properties so typed input is captured and displayed. It then wires the hook’s submit function, resets the form after data is handled, and disables Save until either field changes. Finally, the notEmpty validation hook requires a title and displays a required-field error when a submission contains only a description.


### [Leveraging Go Worker Pools to Scale Server-side Data Sharing](https://yomu.fyi/post/leveraging-go-worker-pools-to-scale-server-side-data-sharing.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Sep 9, 2022

Shopify’s Server Pixels service validates, processes, augments, and produces more than one billion customer events daily, but rising traffic caused Kafka input-topic consumption lag when downstream processing slowed. Its original design could spawn an unlimited number of goroutines while processing or producing event batches, consuming CPU and memory and threatening the five-minute event-processing SLO. The service was redesigned around fixed-size Go worker pools: workers receive Job values through channels, process them via reusable work functions, and use wait groups and context cancellation for orderly shutdown. Load testing showed 15 workers in both processor and producer raised throughput to 12.9 thousand events per second per pod, while 50 workers reached 19.3 thousand; subsequent improvements reached 21 thousand, a 170% increase over 7.75 thousand, and the service handled a maximum of 46 thousand events per second during BFCM 2021.


### [Four Approaches to Debugging Server-side WebAssembly](https://yomu.fyi/post/four-approaches-to-debugging-server-side-webassembly.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Sep 7, 2022

Server-side WebAssembly offers Shopify Functions low cold-start latency and robust security, but debugging remains difficult because step-debugger support is less refined. The post compares four approaches: compiling to a native architecture, using LLDB or GDB with Wasmtime, using a dedicated WebAssembly debugger, and using browser developer tools. Native debugging generally provides the best variable rendering and a familiar workflow, though it may require stubs for external calls and cannot reproduce WebAssembly-specific behavior. Wasmtime keeps execution closer to the target environment, while dedicated and browser-based tools offer WebAssembly-specific capabilities but have missing features or lower-fidelity variable views. The recommended choice depends on whether the issue reproduces natively, and browser-based tooling may become more accessible as it improves.


### [Focus On Behavior, Not State, for a More Maintainable Codebase](https://yomu.fyi/post/focus-on-behavior-not-state-for-a-more-maintainable-codebase.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Sep 1, 2022

Shopify’s work adding pre-orders and “try before you buy” to its Purchase Options APIs exposed code that coupled selling plans too tightly to subscriptions, making future purchase models harder to add. The team reframed the domain around orders and behaviors, treating subscriptions as recurring orders and distinguishing recurring or deferred delivery and billing where those properties mattered. It introduced a wrapper around selling-plan Active Record objects, replaced those objects outside their defining component, and exposed methods such as whether deliveries are recurring while keeping policy details encapsulated. Because platform behavior and merchant reporting need different concepts, the team also added a translation table populated at order creation, with calculated or merchant-provided labels and optional trait records; the maintenance cost isolates reporting semantics from platform and data-team logic.


### [RailsConf 2022: 10 Shopify Tech Talks You Might Have Missed](https://yomu.fyi/post/railsconf-2022-10-shopify-tech-talks-you-might-have-missed.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Aug 30, 2022

Ruby Central has posted videos from RailsConf talks and workshops online, following the 2022 in-person conference where several Shopify Ruby on Rails team members attended and around a dozen gave talks. The collection features ten Shopify sessions on Rails’s state, Ruby’s YARV virtual machine, cache serialization, algorithmic complexity, historical Ruby gems, supply-chain attacks, team trust, GraphQL delivery, and regular-expression denial-of-service attacks. Several talks use concrete technical examples: MessagePack replaced Marshal in the core monolith’s cache, OpenTelemetry is used to diagnose performance issues, and one tutorial demonstrates GraphQL delivery through WebSockets, Webhooks, WebAssembly code, and Bulk Operations. The sessions also connect implementation details with broader engineering practices, including investment in open-source teams, playful problem solving, pair programming, Rubocop, compilers, and examining older code to inform current decisions.


### [When Culture and Code Reviews Collide, Communication is Key](https://yomu.fyi/post/when-culture-and-code-reviews-collide-communication-is-key.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Aug 26, 2022

The post examines how cultural differences in politeness, directness, and face-saving can distort written code reviews, causing useful feedback to be softened, misread, or ignored. It contrasts a passive-aggressive Shopify pull-request exchange about missing permalink tests with a more curious and explicit version that states why a separate test would be worthwhile. The discussion distinguishes assuming positive intent from asserting it: context can reduce bias, but it must not erase the impact of embarrassing or harmful communication. It recommends treating reviews as collaborative invitations, asking questions, explaining reasoning, acknowledging reviewers as contributors, and looking past stylistic language to shared goals. The conclusion is that clearer communication and shared ownership can make disagreement productive and improve both learning and the codebase.


### [Shopify Data’s Guide To Opportunity Sizing](https://yomu.fyi/post/shopify-data-s-guide-to-opportunity-sizing.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Aug 25, 2022

Opportunity sizing gives businesses a structured way to estimate an initiative’s potential impact and compare it with the cost of pursuing alternatives. The framework recommends expressing an estimate as an expected change in a metric, with a range, timeframe, and documented assumptions; an annualized view makes initiatives easier to compare. Directional t-shirt sizing uses rough benchmarks for early ideation and sanity checks, while bottom-up sizing uses observed performance from a comparable product or system, such as email click-through rates, to produce a more accurate estimate. Top-down sizing is intended for new initiatives without comparable systems and starts with broader market or audience information before narrowing the estimate. Shopify recommends connecting initiative-level changes to wider business goals, testing estimates against actual results after launch, and refining the process over time.


### [How We Built Oxygen: Hydrogen’s Counterpart for Hosting Custom Storefronts](https://yomu.fyi/post/how-we-built-oxygen-hydrogen-s-counterpart-for-hosting-custom-storefro.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Aug 23, 2022

Oxygen is Shopify’s hosting counterpart for Hydrogen custom storefronts, designed to provide globally available, fast storefronts with secure Shopify integration without additional third-party hosting costs. Its architecture combines GitHub and GitHub Actions with Cloudflare Workers and edge distribution, Shopify CDN, Admin API, Identity and Access Management, and Oxygen-scoped developer tooling and observability. Requests pass through a Gateway Worker, which validates authorization for the shop and storefront version before using Cloudflare’s Dynamic Dispatch API to route traffic to a Storefront Worker running Hydrogen code. Rather than build proprietary infrastructure, Shopify reused Cloudflare’s worker platform to reduce upfront complexity, scale, and security risks, while its observability stack uses Grafana, Cortex, Loki, and Tempo. Oxygen is used in production by Allbirds, Shopify Supply, Shopify Hardware, and Denim Tears, and is generally available to Plus merchants.


### [How We Enable Two-Day Delivery in the Shopify Fulfillment Network](https://yomu.fyi/post/how-we-enable-two-day-delivery-in-the-shopify-fulfillment-network.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Aug 18, 2022

Shopify Fulfillment Network (SFN) enables merchants to offer two-day delivery across the United States by balancing inventory across Shopify-certified warehouses and choosing suitable carrier services. Shopify’s platform adds GraphQL APIs that let any third-party logistics provider upload pre-computed delivery dates, while storefront and checkout surfaces display them to buyers. SFN calculates schedules using inventory proximity, product weight, dimensions and hazard constraints, warehouse calendars and capacity, carrier pickups, closures, capacity limits, and time-in-transit data. It groups SKUs with shared inventory locations and characteristics into reusable schedules, maps each SKU to one, and supports direct delivery-date lookups in under 100 milliseconds; the selected date is returned to SFN for fulfillment routing.


### [Instant Performance Upgrade: From FlatList to FlashList](https://yomu.fyi/post/instant-performance-upgrade-from-flatlist-to-flashlist.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Aug 17, 2022

Shopify’s React Native Foundations team created FlashList as a faster, easier alternative to React Native’s FlatList, targeting frame drops, blank cells, and high memory use across a wide range of devices. FlatList creates new views during updates, while FlashList recycles already-allocated cells and moves some layout operations to native, using a 250-pixel default buffer to reduce memory footprint and load times. Its API is nearly the same as FlatList, so an existing list can be swapped by changing the component name and optionally adding estimatedItemSize, with features such as type-specific recycling, flexible column spans, and FPS and blank-cell metrics. Extensive Android testing found performance of 60 FPS or greater even on low-end devices, and Shopify Mobile uses FlashList as its default while Shop moved search to it.


### [When is JIT Faster Than A Compiler?](https://yomu.fyi/post/when-is-jit-faster-than-a-compiler.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Aug 11, 2022

JIT compilation can outperform ahead-of-time compilation or interpretation for highly dynamic languages such as Ruby by optimizing runtime behavior under assumptions that static approaches cannot safely make. Ruby permits redefining operators, equality, iteration, hashing, and other behavior at any time, even from a background thread, forcing an interpreter to check whether definitions changed and limiting AOT code to conservative behavior. YJIT addresses this by compiling frequently used methods with assumptions about current definitions, then invalidating and discarding compiled versions when those assumptions become false; later calls can run interpreted code until a new version is compiled. The post presents this speculative optimization and de-optimization model as the reason a JIT can be faster, while noting that YJIT had known bugs in Ruby 3.1 and was expected to be closer to production-ready for some uses in Ruby 3.2.


### [Six Tips for Staying Technical as a CTO](https://yomu.fyi/post/six-tips-for-staying-technical-as-a-cto.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Aug 9, 2022

The article examines how a CTO can remain technically credible after moving from the individual contributor track into leadership. It argues that leadership inevitably reduces technical depth because performance reviews, one-on-ones, organizational communication, and other people responsibilities limit time in code, making the transition an intentional choice for those who value managing people. Its recommended practices include voracious reading, coding as a hobby, participating in hackathons, learning directly from more technical colleagues, maintaining a private network of technical advisors, and aggressively clearing bugs, incident-remediation work, and backlog. The author illustrates hands-on learning with Shopify’s Spin environment, which provisions a cloud development instance and opens a repository in about 30 seconds, and concludes that controlling operational issues preserves time for innovation and technical leadership.


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