A brand-new querying language, a React-based framework, 3D virtual worlds, and a laptop in the cloud

Hello!

This month we're sharing plenty of behind-the-scenes details on how we built some cool stuff, like Hydrogen, our React-based framework for building online stores; ShopifyQL, a commerce-focused querying language; Shopify Party, a browser-based internal tool full of games and 3D virtual adventures; and Isospin, our cloud-native development environment. 

If you caught wind of Shopify Editions this month (where we announced over 100 product updates), you know we've been keeping busy. So stay tuned for more "how we made this" stories coming up for other recent releases (yes—including this one!).

• Follow the Engineering Blog to catch up on previous posts and take a deep dive into the engineering stories powering Shopify. 
• Join us on Twitter to engage in captivating conversations, enjoy our best gifs, and debate tabs vs spaces.
• Visit our events page to find out where you can meet with and hear from Shopify engineers, both physically and virtually.

— Ashley Sawatsky, Copy Editor, Shopify Engineering

How We Built Hydrogen

By Josh Larson, Senior Staff Developer

We've spent over a year building Hydrogen. It's our React-based framework for building performant storefronts fast, with a fantastic developer experience (who knew building online stores could be this much fun?) 

In this post, Josh talks about the big technology bets we made (React Server Components, anyone?), what we learned, and the many collaborations that went into bringing Hydrogen to life. Check out the blog post, then get to know Hydrogen even better with our extensive dev docs.

Introducing ShopifyQL: Our New Commerce Data Querying Language 

By Randy Cupovic, Product Manager, ShopifyQL

As data scientists, engineers, and developers, we know that data is a key factor in business decisions across all industries. But data exploration isn't a core competency of our average merchant, so we built ShopifyQL: an intuitive, commerce-focused querying language. 

This post by Randy breaks down how ShopifyQL works, how we created it, and how we see it evolving down the road. 

How We Built Shopify Party

By Daniel Beauchamp, AR/VR Principal Engineer

So you want to feel connected to your co-workers, but the thought of one more video meeting makes you want to flip your desk? We get it. One of the ways we've tackled this dilemma is by creating Shopify Party—a browser-based internal tool we built for, well, fun. 

You can see it for yourself in this blog post, chock-full of video clips from Shopify Party's 3D virtual worlds and games. And, of course, Daniel shares the details of the tech stack that powers the game and how it was brought from a kind-of-wacky idea to a real thing in just three months.

The Journey to Cloud Development: How Shopify Went All-in on Spin

By Don Kelly, Production Engineering Manager

When we realized we were outgrowing our development environment, we knew the solution wouldn't be as simple as building and shipping an upgraded version of what we'd been using. We needed to zoom way out, experiment, and pay close attention to feedback loops to set ourselves up for long-term success. 

Don takes us through the journey of reinventing our dev environment, the lessons we learned along the way, and how a nugget of wisdom from our CEO spawned the idea of a "laptop in the cloud", which would eventually become a Linux distro with customized tooling that we called Isospin.

FlashList: Now Open Source

We just dropped an announcement on the @ShopifyEng Twitter that we're open sourcing FlashList. You can swap from FlatList now (it only takes seconds). Star the project in GitHub to follow along, and join the conversation in  Discord.

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