---
title: "Meet Shopify Developer Kirsten Westeinde  - Shopify"
description: "Kirsten Westeinde’s just-over-five-year Shopify career spans internal tools, partner-facing applications, and backend development on Kit as the company scaled. She began with Ruby on Rails, later helped extract partner software from Shopify Core using Elasticsearch, Kafka, Ruby on Rails, and the Shopify API, and now works with Data Engineering on real-time recommendations. The feature combines Go and Ruby and is designed to handle the current load while scaling to future demand. Her problem-solving practices include whiteboarding system interactions, taking mental breaks, and writing or explaining ideas to align collaborators. She also describes mentorship, pair programming, a women’s developer meetup, and f(empower) as ways to support growth and address exclusion, bias, and microaggressions in technology."
---

# Meet Shopify Developer Kirsten Westeinde  - Shopify

[Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify) · 2023-10-18 · Mar 22, 2019

**Type:** Explainer

## Summary

Kirsten Westeinde’s just-over-five-year Shopify career spans internal tools, partner-facing applications, and backend development on Kit as the company scaled. She began with Ruby on Rails, later helped extract partner software from Shopify Core using Elasticsearch, Kafka, Ruby on Rails, and the Shopify API, and now works with Data Engineering on real-time recommendations. The feature combines Go and Ruby and is designed to handle the current load while scaling to future demand. Her problem-solving practices include whiteboarding system interactions, taking mental breaks, and writing or explaining ideas to align collaborators. She also describes mentorship, pair programming, a women’s developer meetup, and f(empower) as ways to support growth and address exclusion, bias, and microaggressions in technology.

## Context

The profile follows Westeinde’s progression through several Shopify teams while the company scaled, her development as an engineer and manager, and the challenges she encountered around mentorship, representation, exclusion, bias, and microaggressions affecting women in technology.

## Approach / What changed

Westeinde describes building internal and partner-facing software, extracting partner tools from Shopify Core, and developing real-time recommendation infrastructure with Go, Ruby, and Data Engineering. She approaches difficult problems through whiteboarding, taking breaks, and writing or explaining ideas, while supporting growth through mentorship, pair programming, a developer meetup, and f(empower).

## Takeaways

- A Shopify recommendation feature uses Go and Ruby to generate and deliver a high volume of recommendations in real time, with architecture intended to support both current and future load.
- Westeinde uses whiteboards to map system components and interactions, mental breaks to create space for clearer thinking, and written explanations to align collaborators.
- Mentorship, pair programming, a bi-weekly women developers’ meetup, and the f(empower) employee resource group support career growth and create space to discuss workplace challenges.

**Tags:** [Go](https://yomu.fyi/topic/go), [Mentorship](https://yomu.fyi/topic/mentorship), [Recommendation Systems](https://yomu.fyi/topic/recommendation-systems), [Ruby on Rails](https://yomu.fyi/topic/ruby-on-rails)

- Source: [Shopify](https://shopify.engineering/developer-kirsten-westeinde-talks-developing-a-growth-mindset-the-early-days-of-shopify-and-working-with-go)
- Source URL: https://shopify.engineering/developer-kirsten-westeinde-talks-developing-a-growth-mindset-the-early-days-of-shopify-and-working-with-go
- Ingested by Yomu: 2026-08-31T01:14:30.234Z

[Read original post](https://shopify.engineering/developer-kirsten-westeinde-talks-developing-a-growth-mindset-the-early-days-of-shopify-and-working-with-go)