Shopify Engineering - Shopify Engineering

Improving Shopify App’s Performance

2024-03-05T15:37:37-05:00

A Packwerk Retrospective

2024-02-07T16:40:35-05:00

Horizontally scaling the Rails backend of Shop app with Vitess

2024-01-17T15:34:53-05:00

Shop app horizontally scaled a Ruby on Rails app with Vitess. This blog describes Vitess and our detailed approach for introducing Vitess to a Rails app.

Getting Started with React Native Skia

2023-12-04T10:00:03-05:00

Introducing Ruvy

2023-10-18T09:43:29-04:00

Building a ShopifyQL Code Editor

2023-09-11T10:02:54-04:00

Sidekick’s Improved Streaming Experience

2023-08-01T16:08:07-04:00

Shopify’s platform is the Web platform

2023-07-26T11:51:33-04:00

Contributing support for a Wasm instruction to Winch

2023-07-18T16:17:28-04:00

Jeff Charles, a Senior Shopify Developer, shares key learnings from his successful pull request to Winch. The pull request aimed to add support for various WebAssembly instructions to Wasmtime's baseline (non-optimizing) compiler.

Creating a Flexible Order Routing System with Shopify Functions

2023-04-13T09:30:00-04:00

In this article, I’ll cover how we added flexibility to our previous one-size-fits-all order routing system with the introduction of “routing rules”, and how we dogfooded our own Shopify Functions feature to give merchants the ability to create their own routing rules.

Adventures in Garbage Collection: Improving GC Performance in our Massive Monolith

2023-04-06T10:30:00-04:00

At the beginning of this year, we ran several experiments aimed at reducing the latency impact of the Ruby garbage collector (GC) in Shopify's monolith. In this article, Jean talks about the changes we made to improve GC performance, and more importantly, how we got to these changes.

How Migrating from Vanilla Redux to Redux Toolkit Improved State Management in Shopify POS

2023-03-31T09:30:02-04:00

A look at Shopify’s experience improving state management in the Shopify POS app by migrating from a Vanilla Redux codebase to Redux Toolkit one.

What Being a Staff Developer Means at Shopify

2023-03-29T10:00:01-04:00

A staff developer is an adaptable engineering leader that's comfortable working with ambiguity.

Supporting Passkeys in Shop's Authentication Flows

2023-03-24T09:00:01-04:00

Passkeys are a new login credential based on public-key cryptography that replace the need for username and password sign-ins.

Lessons From Linguistics: i18n Best Practices for Front-End Developers

2023-03-16T14:19:33-04:00

Here are a few internationalization (i18n) best practices to help front-end developers avoid errors and serve more robust text content on multilingual websites and apps.

Tophat: Crafting a Delightful Mobile Developer Experience

2023-03-14T10:30:00-04:00

Shopify created tooling that provides a seamless and interactive manual testing experience (aka tophatting) to contributors. We built a desktop macOS application called “Tophat” that lives in the system menu bar.

Unlocking Real-time Predictions with Shopify's Machine Learning Platform

2023-03-10T11:16:27-05:00

Learn how Shopify Data built new online inference capabilities into its Machine Learning Platform to deploy and serve models for real-time prediction at scale.

Improving the Developer Experience with the Ruby LSP

2023-02-24T09:00:01-05:00

The Ruby LSP is a new language server built at Shopify that makes coding in Ruby even better by providing extra Ruby features for any editor that has a client layer for the LSP. In this article, we’ll cover how we built the Ruby LSP, the features included within it, and how you can install it.

The Case Against Monkey Patching, From a Rails Core Team Member

2023-02-21T09:00:04-05:00

Monkey patching is considered one of the more powerful features of the Ruby programming language. However, by the end of this post I’m hoping to convince you that they should be used sparingly, if at all, because they are brittle, dangerous, and often unnecessary. I’ll also share tips on how to use them as safely as possible in the rare cases where you do need to monkey patch.

The 25 Percent Rule for Tackling Technical Debt

2023-02-16T12:00:01-05:00

Let’s talk about technical debt. Let’s talk about practical usable approaches for actually paying it down on a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly basis. Let’s talk about what debt needs to be fixed now versus what can wait for better planning.

ShopifyQL Notebooks: Simplifying Querying with Commerce Data Models

2023-02-14T11:00:04-05:00

We recently released ShopifyQL Notebooks, a powerful self-serve tool which enables merchants to explore their business metrics without any SQL expertise. Here’s how we used ShopifyQL and commerce data models to make it possible.

Bringing Javascript to WebAssembly for Shopify Functions

2023-02-09T09:00:02-05:00

While we’re working on getting our Shopify Functions infrastructure ready for the public beta, we thought we’d use this opportunity to shine some light on how we brought JavaScript to WebAssembly, how we made everything fit within our very tight Shopify Function constraints, and what our plans for the future look like.

The Complex Data Models Behind Shopify's Tax Insights Feature

2023-02-08T10:00:04-05:00

The intensive data work behind Shopify's Tax Insights feature required building functionality to handle dynamically changing information

The Hardest Part of Writing Tests is Getting Started

2023-02-02T10:30:00-05:00

The hardest part of writing tests is setting things up. Full test suites have a lot of complicated helper tools, stubs, and fixtures. They’re not easy to understand as a beginner, let alone set up for yourself. This post covers the four things you can do to get started.

Performance Testing At Scale—for BFCM and Beyond

2023-01-27T11:32:54-05:00

Let’s unpack our approach to BFCM Scale Testing to explore some of what it takes to ensure that our ecommerce platform can handle the busiest weekend of the year.

From Farmer to Security Engineer: How Dev Degree Helped Me Find My Dream Job

2023-01-26T11:00:02-05:00

This story looks at the opportunity Dev Degree gave me, the challenges I overcame, and the weaknesses that turned out to be strengths. If you’re thinking about a career in tech, but don’t think you have the stuff for it, this story is for you.

Making Your React Native Gestures Feel Natural

2023-01-20T13:37:05-05:00

Ruby 3.2’s YJIT is Production-Ready

2023-01-17T08:30:02-05:00

YJIT, a just-in-time (JIT) implementation on top of CRuby built at Shopify, is now production-ready and delivering major improvements to performance and speed. Maxime (Senior Staff Engineer and leader of the YJIT project) shares the updates that have been made in this newest version of YJIT, and future plans for further optimization.

How Good Documentation Can Improve Productivity

2023-01-12T10:00:04-05:00

Good documentation has many benefits, but first and foremost it boosts engineers’ productivity. Here are a few tips to encourage a strong writing culture.

From Ruby to Node: Overhauling Shopify’s CLI for a Better Developer Experience

2023-01-10T08:00:01-05:00

In this blog post, Pedro explains why we rewrote Shopify CLI into Node instead of Ruby, the tradeoffs that came with the decision, the principles we embraced in this new iteration, and the challenges and ideas ahead of us to explore.