---
title: "Nerd Out on 10 of Our Favorite Posts From 2021"
description: "Shopify’s year-end roundup curates ten favorite engineering posts from 2021, spanning Ruby, storefronts, data analysis, databases, search, GraphQL, CI, APIs, and mobile development, while also noting several older reader favorites. The selection includes tutorials on building a web app with standard Ruby libraries, exploratory data analysis, GraphQL, Apache Beam for search, and React Native App Clips, alongside technical accounts of Hydrogen, YJIT, MySQL upgrades, and GraphQL rate limiting. YJIT was merged upstream and included in Ruby 3.1.0, while the CI team reduced the p95 of Shopify’s core monolith from 45 minutes to 18 minutes. The roundup also describes query-cost-based GraphQL rate limiting, rollback-testing roadblocks during a MySQL upgrade, and an App Clip effort that used a fail-fast, iterative approach."
---

# Nerd Out on 10 of Our Favorite Posts From 2021

[Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify) · 2023-10-18 · Dec 29, 2021

**Type:** Announcement

## Summary

Shopify’s year-end roundup curates ten favorite engineering posts from 2021, spanning Ruby, storefronts, data analysis, databases, search, GraphQL, CI, APIs, and mobile development, while also noting several older reader favorites. The selection includes tutorials on building a web app with standard Ruby libraries, exploratory data analysis, GraphQL, Apache Beam for search, and React Native App Clips, alongside technical accounts of Hydrogen, YJIT, MySQL upgrades, and GraphQL rate limiting. YJIT was merged upstream and included in Ruby 3.1.0, while the CI team reduced the p95 of Shopify’s core monolith from 45 minutes to 18 minutes. The roundup also describes query-cost-based GraphQL rate limiting, rollback-testing roadblocks during a MySQL upgrade, and an App Clip effort that used a fail-fast, iterative approach.

## Context

The post closes out 2021 by presenting a curated selection of Shopify engineering posts that covered varied technologies and disciplines, along with older posts that remained popular with readers.

## Approach / What changed

It organizes ten featured posts into a numbered list, briefly describing each post’s subject, technical contribution, or result, then adds a bonus list of three older favorites.

## Takeaways

- YJIT, a just-in-time compiler built inside CRuby, was merged upstream and became part of the Ruby 3.1.0 release.
- Shopify’s core monolith’s CI p95 was reduced from 45 minutes to 18 minutes, decreasing developer wait time.
- The GraphQL Admin API rate-limiting approach calculates query costs that adapt to client data needs while providing a more predictable server load.

**Tags:** [CI/CD](https://yomu.fyi/topic/ci-cd), [GraphQL](https://yomu.fyi/topic/graphql), [MySQL](https://yomu.fyi/topic/mysql), [Performance](https://yomu.fyi/topic/performance), [Search](https://yomu.fyi/topic/search)

- Source: [Shopify](https://shopify.engineering/10-favorite-posts-2021)
- Source URL: https://shopify.engineering/10-favorite-posts-2021
- Ingested by Yomu: 2026-08-30T15:28:10.587Z

[Read original post](https://shopify.engineering/10-favorite-posts-2021)