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I find it difficult to imagine why you would need 1000 developers in most single projects. The cost of managing so many people and work streams would seem to ov

I find it difficult to imagine why you would need 1000 developers in most single projects. The cost of managing so many people and work streams would seem to overwhelm whatever volume you could get out of them

irfansharif 7y ago
The core shopify codebase is a monolithic one, hence the merging infrastructure described in the post. It's not a "single project" in any useful definition of the phrase.
- baroffoos 7y ago
  Im interested how what looks to me like a fairly standard web store could have such an enormous amount if developers working on it. Is there some kind of insane complexity behind webstores I am not seeing here?
  - jacktli 7y ago
    It’s about providing a platform for enabling global commerce. Our engineering blog has other posts that goes into technical depth about a lot of the challenges we face, and our solutions. For context, here is some info about Black Friday/Cyber Monday for us last year: https://engineering.shopify.com/blogs/engineering/preparing-shopify-for-black-friday-cyber-monday https://engineering.shopify.com/blogs/engineering/preparing-...
    - baroffoos 7y ago
      I understand its a hugely popular service and there is a lot that goes in to something so big but there are bigger websites that run on much much smaller teams of developers. I just don't understand how there is even enough surface area on the app that 1000 people could be working on it at the same time. Is that number counting people working on the ops stuff or building other tooling not part of the main app?
      - winrid 7y ago
        Think of it this way. 100 different projects. Each with different business goals etc. Make some of the teams Platform teams for good measure.
  - leetbulb 7y ago
    Shopify is far more than just a "fairly standard web store"
allthetime 7y ago
Yeah, honestly, as a person who has had the ill fortune of having to work with shopify, I find this kind of boasting kind of funny. Every admin console page load takes ten seconds and their backend can't handle a product with more than 100 variants. They clearly got too big too fast and just piled code on code on code until they ended up with what they have today. They should focus on upgrading the quality of their system, take 20 of those developers and start on a complete rebuild, and spend a little less time wrangling 1000 devs.
evan_ 7y ago
When you have 100 devs working on the same codebase the bugs start to get so gnarly you need 900 more devs to fix them.

irfansharif 7y ago

The core shopify codebase is a monolithic one, hence the merging infrastructure described in the post. It's not a "single project" in any useful definition of the phrase.

baroffoos 7y ago
Im interested how what looks to me like a fairly standard web store could have such an enormous amount if developers working on it. Is there some kind of insane complexity behind webstores I am not seeing here?
- jacktli 7y ago
  It’s about providing a platform for enabling global commerce. Our engineering blog has other posts that goes into technical depth about a lot of the challenges we face, and our solutions. For context, here is some info about Black Friday/Cyber Monday for us last year: https://engineering.shopify.com/blogs/engineering/preparing-shopify-for-black-friday-cyber-monday https://engineering.shopify.com/blogs/engineering/preparing-...
  - baroffoos 7y ago
    I understand its a hugely popular service and there is a lot that goes in to something so big but there are bigger websites that run on much much smaller teams of developers. I just don't understand how there is even enough surface area on the app that 1000 people could be working on it at the same time. Is that number counting people working on the ops stuff or building other tooling not part of the main app?
    - winrid 7y ago
      Think of it this way. 100 different projects. Each with different business goals etc. Make some of the teams Platform teams for good measure.
- leetbulb 7y ago
  Shopify is far more than just a "fairly standard web store"

allthetime 7y ago

Yeah, honestly, as a person who has had the ill fortune of having to work with shopify, I find this kind of boasting kind of funny. Every admin console page load takes ten seconds and their backend can't handle a product with more than 100 variants. They clearly got too big too fast and just piled code on code on code until they ended up with what they have today. They should focus on upgrading the quality of their system, take 20 of those developers and start on a complete rebuild, and spend a little less time wrangling 1000 devs.

evan_ 7y ago

When you have 100 devs working on the same codebase the bugs start to get so gnarly you need 900 more devs to fix them.