Shopify

I had the good fortune to join Shopify when it was still a fairly small company, and to ride on the back of its incredible growth for over a decade. Though I joined with only a (mostly) irrelevant business degree and a little self-taught knowledge on web development, Shopify offered me as great an education as I had the agency to ask for. I learned from many talented peers, and we all learned from the lessons the company’s growth offered to us.

I worked at Shopify as a principal engineer who used a specialty in “front end development” — building web and mobile user interfaces — as my entry into most projects. I am a greedy student in all parts of building great software, though, and I loved this focus on the user interface as a way to contribute more naturally in broader product design decisions. As a platform company, Shopify offers a fascinating set of engineering, design, and business questions; what technology do the business customers need to show up at their best for their buyers, and what lower-level technologies does Shopify need to enable all of those varied businesses? How do you balance the needs of the platform, its business customers, and its buyers? How do you determine a fair division of value between Shopify, its customers, and its third-party developers? I was lucky to contribute to exploring these questions, and many more.

My time at Shopify was deeply formative for me, personally and professionally. It helped me discover many behaviours, systems, and values that I came to deeply appreciate, and that I will carry with me through the rest of my career. Three in particular stand out:

• Entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is a brave act of self-determination, but it can be a messy, lonely, and terrifying path. Few companies support those walking this path more than Shopify. I was inspired by the many small businesses I got to see fight through these challenges to bring their vision — often a distillation of a lifelong passion — into the real world. Selfishly, it still feels wonderful to check out at my favorite ice cream shop, or at the kind, long-running florist, or at many other local businesses, all on software I helped to write, and to know that I had played a small part in helping so many.
• The internet. The internet is one of humanity’s greatest works of engineering; I find it difficult to explain to non-web engineers how something so complex can work at all, let alone continue evolving, without any of the classic trappings of “control” we see elsewhere in life and business. Shopify actively contributed to continuing to improve the web as a platform, improvements that benefited people who will never buy anything from a Shopify store. The company’s enormous scale also meant that my own personal efforts to make the web a nicer, fairer place — improvements to checkout or storefront performance and accessibility, for example — were magnified more than I could have ever dreamed of.
• Open source. Open source is a beautiful culture of gift giving, and I strongly believe that the commercial entities built on these gifts owe a duty of reciprocity. Shopify was an exemplary corporate supporter in my experience. The company gave time and resources with existing open source projects like Rails, and generously shared back many software projects that would never have left a private repository elsewhere. Shopify also taught me that the principles and practices embedded in open source can be weaved deeply into the shape of a whole company, even as it grows big.