Welcome to the final Shopify Engineering newsletter of 2022! We hope the end of your year is warm and bright, whether you’re celebrating Christmas, Hanukkah, Yule, Yalda, Kwanzaa, Festivus, or the release of Ruby 3.2. Our Ruby dev-elf-opers have been busy in the Ruby 3.2 workshop and they have plenty of presents to show for it, like VWA for everyone! 

Thanks for sticking with us this year (especially after that elf wordplay). See you in 2023!

- Your Editor, Ashley Sawatsky

Shopify Embraces Rust for Systems Programming

DEVELOPMENT  •  BY MIKE SHAVER

In addition to our commitment to Ruby for its flexibility and expressiveness, we have recently adopted Rust as our official systems programming language. As part of this, we have joined the Rust Foundation, and we’re excited about participating in the Rust community.

Optimizing Ruby’s Memory Layout: Variable Width Allocation

DEVELOPMENT  •  BY PETER ZHU

Senior Developer & Ruby core committer Peter introduces how Shopify is improving CRuby’s performance in Ruby 3.2 by optimizing the memory layout in the garbage collector through the Variable Width Allocation project.

Our Solution for Measuring React Native Rendering Times

DEVELOPMENT  •  BY ELVIRA BURCHIK

After we started using React Native, we had to find a way to confirm our mobile apps are fast. The solution is an open-source @shopify/react-native-performance library by Shopify, which measures rendering times in React Native apps. In this article, you’ll learn more about how the library works, how to get started, and why measuring performance is so important. 

Three Essential Remote Work Practices for Engineering Teams

CULTURE  •  BY  JAMES STANIER

Remote work expert and Director of Engineering James Stanier highlights three practices that are essential to succeeding remotely, based on our experience going digital by design starting in 2020. 

3 (More) Tips for Optimizing Apache Flink Applications

DATA SCIENCE & ENGINEERING •  BY  KEVIN LAM & RAFAEL AGUIAR

We’ve adopted Apache Flink as a standard stateful streaming engine that powers a variety of use cases. Earlier this year, we shared our top seven tips for optimizing large stateful Flink applications. In this post, we’ll walk you through 3 more best practices.

Life at Shopify

We all get shit done, ship fast, and learn. We operate on low process and high trust, and trade on impact. You have to care deeply about what you’re doing, and commit to continuously developing your craft, to keep pace here. Sound like the right place for you?