How Shopify built the one network edge to front our services and systems.

An informal look at what makes encoding-aware strings in Ruby functional and performant, providing insight into all the wonderful things the Ruby VM does.

In this post, I’ll show you how I approached implementing the Add to Favorite animation in Shopify’s Shop app. Specifically, we can look at the animation of the product image thumbnail appearing, then moving into the favorites tab bar icon.

If you’re a data scientist on a product team, much of your work involves getting a product ready for release. You may conduct exploratory data analyses to understand your product’s market, or build the data models and pipelines needed to power a new product feature, or design a machine learning model to unlock new product functionality. But your work doesn’t end once a product goes live. After a product is released, it’s your job to help identify if your product is a success.

At Shopify we run more than 170,000 tests in our core monolith. Naturally, we're constantly exploring ways to make this faster, and the Test Infrastructure team analyzed the feasibility of introducing a test budget: a fixed amount of time for tests to run. The goal is to speed up the continuous integration (CI) test running phase by accepting more risk. To achieve that goal we used prioritization to reorder the test execution plan in order to increase the probability of a fast failure. Our analysis provided insights into the effectiveness of executing prioritized tests under a time constraint. The single most important finding was that we were able to find failures after we had run only 70% of the test-selection suite.

V8 is Google’s open source high-performance JavaScript and WebAssembly engine written in C++. v8go is a library written in Go and C++ allowing users to execute JavaScript from Go using V8 isolates. Using Cgo bindings allows us to run JavaScript in Go at native performance.

The v8go library, developed by Roger Chapman, aims to provide an idiomatic way for Go developers to interface with V8. As it turns out, this can be tricky. For the past few months, I’ve been contributing to v8go to expose functionality in V8. In particular, I’ve been adding support to expose the V8 CPU Profiler.

We’ve spent a lot of time on performance tuning our Apache Flink application. We’ll walk you through key lessons for optimizing large stateful Apache Flink applications.

How Shopify solved the dependency confusion vulnerability in over 600 Ruby applications and created tailored large-scale migration tooling to make it easier.

In distributed systems, there’s plenty of occasions for things to go wrong. This is why resiliency and redundancy are important. But no matter the systems you put in place, no matter whether you did or didn’t touch your deployments, issues might arise. It makes it critical to acknowledge the near misses: the situations where something could have gone wrong and the situations where something did, but it could have been worse. When was the last time it happened to you? For us, at Shopify, it was on September 30th, 2021, when the expiration of Let’s Encrypt’s (old) root certificate almost led to a global outage of our platform.

The future of commerce is dynamic, contextual, and personalized. Hydrogen is a React-based framework for building custom and creative storefronts powered by Shopify’s platform and APIs.

We reevaluated our existing product categorization model to ensure we’re understanding what our merchants are selling, to build the best products that help power their sales.

Shopify Data built a real-time buyer signal data pipeline to show relevant customer information to merchants while they’re chatting with their customers.

2020 Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) is over, and another BFCM Globe has shipped. We’re extremely proud of the globe, it focused on realism, performance, and the impact our merchants have on the world.

A deep dive into how Shopify Data revamped the data infrastructure powering our BFCM live map using Apache Flink.

In 2015, it was no longer possible to continue buying a larger database server for Shopify. We finally had no choice but to shard the database, which allowed us to horizontally scale our databases and continue our growth. However, what we gained in performance and scalability we lost in resilience.

In 2019 we set out to rewrite the Shopify storefront implementation. Our goal was to make it faster. We talked about the strategies we used to achieve that goal in a previous post about optimizing server-side rendering and implementing efficient caching. To build on that post, I’ll go into detail on how the Storefront Renderer team tweaked our load balancers to shift traffic between the legacy storefront and the new storefront.