7 minute read In the first post of this series, I outlined Shopify’s history with flash sales, our move to Nginx and Lua to help manage traffic, and the initial attempt we made to throttle traffic that didn’t account sufficiently for customer experience. We had underestimated the impact of not givin...

7 minute read This Sunday, over 100 million viewers will watch the Super Bowl. Whether they’re catching the match-up between the Falcons and the Patriots, or there for the commercials between the action, that’s a lot of eyeballs—and that’s only counting America. But all that attention doesn’t just s...

6 minute read The traditional model of running large-scale computer systems divides work into Development and Operations as distinct and separate teams. This split works reasonably well for computer systems that are changed or updated very rarely, and organizations sometimes require this if they’re ...

6 minute read Hi, I'm Graeme Johnson, and I work on Shopify's Developer Acceleration team. Our mission is to provide tools that let developers ship fast and safely. Recently we began shipping Shopify automatically as developers hit the merge button in GitHub. This removes the final manual step in ou...

3 minute read Hey everyone! I’m Daniel and I lead our VR efforts at Shopify. When I talk to people about VR and commerce, the first idea that usually pops into their heads is about all the possibilities of walking around a virtual shopping mall. While that could be an enjoyable experience for some, ...

1 minute read Today we're excited to share our involvement with the AMP Project. Life happens on mobile. (In fact, there are over seven billion small screens now!) We're not only comfortable with shopping online, but increasingly we're buying things using our mobile devices. Delays can mean the diff...

Last updated: September 9, 2016 2 minute read At Shopify, our mission is to make commerce better for everyone. When we say better, we’re talking about caring deeply about making quality products. To us, a quality web product means a few things: certainly beautiful design, engaging copy, and a fantas...

1 minute read Editor's note: a more updated post on this topic is now up! Check out Sander Lijbrink's "Building a Dynamic Mobile CI System." Over the past few years the mobile development community has seen a dramatic shift towards the use of continuous integration (CI) systems similar to changes pr...

5 minute read At Shopify we frequently need to debug production Rails problems. Adding extra debugging code takes time to write and deploy, so we’ve learned how to use tools like gdb and rbtrace to quickly track down these issues. In this post, we’ll explain how to use gdb to retrieve a Ruby call st...

5 minute read Hi there! We’re Kat and Omosola and we’re software developers at Shopify. We both started working at Shopify back in May, and we felt both excited and a little nervous before we got here. You never know exactly what to expect when you start at a new company and no matter what your prev...

3 minute read After a year of internal use, we’re excited to open-source our deployment tool, Shipit. With dozens of teams pushing code multiple times a day to a variety of different targets, fast and easy deploys are key to developer productivity (and happiness) at Shopify. Along with key improveme...

This is a continuation of our series describing our evolution of Shopify toward a Docker-powered, containerized data centre. Read the last post in the series here. One of the challenges along the road to containerization has been establishing a way to move application secrets like API keys, database...

Today, we’re excited to release go-lua as an Open Source project. Go-lua is an implementation of the Lua programming language written purely in Go. We use go-lua as the core execution engine of our load generation tool. This post outlines its creation, provides examples, and describes some challenge...

"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it." - Brian W. Kernighan Debugging is always challenging, and as programmers we can easily spend a good chunk of every day ...

As we have for the past 3 years, Shopify released a Year in Review to highlight some of the exciting growth and change we’ve observed over the past year. Designers James and Veronica had ambitious ideas for this year’s review, including strong, bold typographic treatments and interactive data visual...

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are the biggest days of the year at Shopify with respect to every metric. As the Infrastructure team started preparing for the upcoming seasonal traffic in the late summer of 2014, we were confident that we could cope, and determined resiliency to be the top priority. A...

I was recently profiling a production Shopify application server using perf and noticed a fair amount of time being spent in a particular function, st_lookup, which is used by Ruby’s MRI implementation for hash table lookups: Hash tables are used all over MRI, and not just for the Hash object; globa...

This is the second in a series of blog posts describing our evolution of Shopify toward a Docker-powered, containerized data center. This instalment will focus on the creation of the container used in our production environment when you visit a Shopify storefront. Read the first post in this series ...

6 minute read This September, we quietly launched a new version of the Shopify admin. Unlike the launch of the previous major iteration of our admin, this version did not include a major overhaul of the visual design, and for the most part, would have gone largely unnoticed by the user. Why would we...

This is the first in a series of posts about adding containers to our server farm to make it easier to scale, manage, and keep pace with our business. The key ingredients are: Docker: container technology for making applications portable and predictable CoreOS: provides a minimal operating system, s...

In the early fall our infrastructure team was considering Kafka, a highly available message bus. We were looking to solve several infrastructure problems that had come up around that time. We were looking for a reliable way to collect event data and send it to our data warehouse. We were considering...

If you go to three different analysts looking for a definition of "churn rate," they will all agree that it's an important metric and that the definition is self evident. Then they will go ahead and give you three different definitions. And as they share their definitions with each other they all ha...