Top all-time · #239
Shopify
Company blog · shopify.engineeringprogrammingweb
Shopify is the company blog at shopify.engineering, writing about programming and web. Since 2020, 205 different Hacker News readers have linked it 307 times, most often “Our Experience Porting the YJIT Ruby Compiler to Rust”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-22, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 4 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
Shopify's engineering blog is linked for in-depth write-ups on Ruby and YJIT, React Native, WebAssembly, database sharding, monolith design and Nix. Commenters call it interesting and point to specific posts.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Shopify powers millions of businesses in more than 175 countries with essential commerce infrastructure. Our engineers and developers work on challenging and impactful projects spanning frontend, backend, mobile and data.
Most-linked posts?
- Our Experience Porting the YJIT Ruby Compiler to Rust7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2022-05-11
- Under the River6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2026-05-28
- How we built the Black Friday Cyber Monday 2023 globe6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2024-10-30
- We replaced Redis with MySQL for inventory reservations–and it scaled6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2026-05-14
- How to Build a Production Grade Workflow with SQL Modelling5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2020-11-19
- Shopify invests in research for Ruby at scale5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2022-05-16
- What Is Nix (2020)5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2021-11-11
- /shop-app-migration5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2026-09-10
- How Shopify Uses WebAssembly Outside of the Browser5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2020-12-19
- YJIT: Building a New JIT Compiler for CRuby5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2021-10-14
What Hacker News says?
2020-01-29: https://shopify.engineering/react-native-future-mobile-shopi... ("After years of native mobile development, we’ve decided to go full steam ahead building all of our new mobile apps using React Native.") 2021-11-08: https://shopify.engineering/high-performance-hydrogen-powere... ("The future of commerce is dynamic, contextual, and personalized. Hydrogen is a React-based framework for building custom and c…
Comment linking /back-to-native
on “Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin”Submitted Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin as a story · 1275 points
HN discussionThe blog post doesn't mention the personnel-related challenges with having two native platform teams working on the app. The post DOES give more information as to why they looked at switching from React Native to native Platform APIs. React Native is forcing a major refactor of React Native apps in switching to the React Native "New Architecture" (see https://reactnative.dev/architecture/landing-page ). So if Shopif…
Comment linking /shop-app-migration
on “Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin”Submitted Five years of React Native at Shopify as a story · 324 points
HN discussionThere's a section linking to a more in depth article: "The Shop app, which is regularly at the top of the list in the shopping category in the app stores, is the first to be migrated. Assisted by AI, the team was able to go from a proof of concept to a fully rebuilt native app published in the app stores in just 12 weeks. We’ve written about this migration in depth here [0]. The migration of the Shopify app (our big…
Comment linking /shop-app-migration
on “Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin”Submitted Lessons learned from running Apache Airflow at scale as a story · 285 points
HN discussionI believe they have a more in-depth posting that talks about it https://shopify.engineering/shop-app-migration
Comment linking /shop-app-migration
on “Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin”Submitted How Shopify Uses WebAssembly Outside of the Browser as a story · 243 points
HN discussionhttps://shopify.engineering/shop-app-migration follow up with some more technical details and benchmarks
Comment linking /shop-app-migration
on “Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin”Submitted Shopify's Data Science and Engineering Foundations (2020) as a story · 205 points
HN discussionIf you expect a story about how this migration to native went from technical PoV, they've already shared this: https://shopify.engineering/shop-app-migration It sounds pretty solid, so I wouldn't expect anything to change in just 6 months.
Comment linking /shop-app-migration
on “Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin”Submitted How to Build a Web App with and Without Rails Libraries as a story · 185 points
HN discussionYou might be interested in this nice write up: https://shopify.engineering/how-we-built-shopifys-bfcm-2023-...
Comment linking /how-we-built-shopifys-bfcm-2023-globe
on “Show HN: A Marble Madness-inspired WebGL game we built for Netlify”Submitted Shopify invests in research for Ruby at scale as a story · 181 points
HN discussion> a single physical piece of hardware that will show its limitations if too many large or active tenants happen to be on the same shard Shopify has pretty much mastered this https://shopify.engineering/mysql-database-shard-balancing-t...
Comment linking /mysql-database-shard-balancing-terabyte-scale
on “How Figma's databases team lived to tell the scale”Submitted Our Experience Porting the YJIT Ruby Compiler to Rust as a story · 169 points
HN discussionThis is likely a better link: https://shopify.engineering/remix-joins-shopify
Comment linking /remix-joins-shopify
on “Remix web framework aquired by Shopify”Submitted How we built the Black Friday Cyber Monday 2023 globe as a story · 167 points
HN discussionJudging the visible output as a metric for how many developers a company needs is very naive. Think about the teams that don't directly interact with the outside like infrastructure, business intelligence, hiring (onboarding tools), internal tooling, all the work they do on Ruby ( https://shopify.engineering/shopify-ruby-at-scale-research-i... ).
Comment linking /shopify-ruby-at-scale-research-investment
on “Remix web framework aquired by Shopify”Submitted How we built Hydrogen, a React framework for building custom storefronts as a story · 157 points
HN discussionThanks for your comment @pphysch! So for authoring an app, I tend to agree with you. Languages like Ruby/Python/Typescript are probably faster to get something working. I try to consider productivity holistically though. With Go, there's a lot less fussing with the tooling. I've also found Go saves a lot of time when onboarding new teammates. This is because of Go's intentional decision to be conservative with synta…
Comment linking /deconstructing-monolith-designing-software-maximizes-developer-productivity
on “Show HN: A Full-Stack Web Framework for Go”Submitted Static Typing for Ruby: Adopting Sorbet at Scale as a story · 155 points
HN discussionShopify made the new Ruby JIT compiler. [0] They're on the Rails Foundation, as is 1Password, among others. Stripe is still in on Ruby too; they're behind the Sorbet gradual type system, and Ruby is a first-class language for working with their API. I always hear the stereotype of companies starting on Rails and migrating later, and I think it sticks around because it makes some level of intuitive sense, but it does…
Comment linking /ruby-yjit-is-production-ready
on “Why Ruby on Rails still matters”Submitted Tips for Shipping Data Products Fast as a story · 153 points
HN discussionSame here. Lots of places are doing this, afaik. shopify from pyspark -> sql https://shopify.engineering/build-production-grade-workflow-...
Comment linking /build-production-grade-workflow-sql-modelling
on “Against SQL”Submitted Migrating to React Native's new architecture as a story · 121 points
HN discussionCool idea. I thought I’d try to make a Kagi Lens to accomplish the same thing: https://kagi.com/lenses/LdYine8hZtYmrt8yTMngOUtvTM9rmkRy Kagi Lenses can be defined in many ways, one of which is specifying URLs to search. Unfortunately you can only provide 10 URLs per lens. Here are the ones I chose: https://stripe.com/blog/engineering , https://engineering.fb.com/ , https://www.uber.com/en-US/blog/engineering/ , http…
Comment linking /
on “Show HN: Engineering.fyi – Search across tech engineering blogs in one place”Submitted Evaluating Search Algorithms as a story · 107 points
HN discussionshopify agrees https://shopify.engineering/back-to-native
Comment linking /back-to-native
on “Rails World 2026 Opening Keynote [video]”Submitted Apache Beam for Search: Getting Started by Hacking Time as a story · 87 points
HN discussion
