The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source Shopify’s massive storefront rewrite (Interview)
Oct 16, 2020
Maxime Vaillancourt, a Shopify engineer, discusses the intricacies of their ambitious storefront rewrite from a Ruby on Rails monolith to a new Ruby-based implementation. He shares insights on maintaining feature parity, optimizing performance, and the challenges of ensuring API consistency during the overhaul. Maxime emphasizes the strategic importance of a modular approach and collaboration within the team, addressing the emotional dynamics and risk management required for such transformative projects.
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Monolith to Microservices
- Shopify's monolith, a Rails app, faced scaling challenges leading to a storefront rewrite.
- The storefront rewrite aimed to improve performance, resilience, and capacity.
Verifier Mechanism and Bug Discovery
- Shopify used a verifier mechanism, comparing outputs of old and new implementations with production data.
- This helped discover a six-year-old bug in the monolith and prioritize impactful fixes.
Backward Compatibility
- Maintain backward compatibility for existing themes, even if it means replicating old bugs.
- Prioritize consistent user experience over immediate code cleanup.