Faster rendering with Liquid-C, prioritizing test budgets, building animations, and measuring product impact

Hello!

This month, we're talking about faster rendering with Liquid-C and prioritizing test budgets. We're also sharing how we built adorable yet functional animations in Shopify's Shop app, and how to measure product success from a data scientist's perspective.

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— Jennie Lundrigan, Senior Engineering Writer

After the Refactor: A Path to Faster Rendering with Liquid-C

By Michael Go, Developer

When I was a high school student in 2013, I co-founded a Shopify app company, Shopulse, with my friend Raphael. It was that year that I first wrote my Liquid code to fix our client’s Shopify theme. Now in 2022, I’m a developer at Shopify working on various projects like Metafields, Pricing, and Customer Accounts. Even nine years later, I haven’t forgotten my fun Liquid experiences. I’ve decided to learn more about Liquid and Liquid-C at Shopify, and try to make it faster!

Test Budget: Time Constrained CI Feedback

By Apostolis Stergiou, Senior Production Engineer

At Shopify we run more than 170,000 tests in our core monolith. Naturally, we're constantly exploring ways to make this faster, and the Test Infrastructure team analyzed the feasibility of introducing a test budget: a fixed amount of time for tests to run. The goal is to speed up the continuous integration (CI) test running phase by accepting more risk. To achieve that goal we used prioritization to reorder the test execution plan in order to increase the probability of a fast failure. Our analysis provided insights into the effectiveness of executing prioritized tests under a time constraint. The single most important finding was that we were able to find failures after we had run only 70% of the test-selection suite.

How We Built the Add to Favorite Animation in Shop

By Andrew Lo. Staff Front End Developer

The team working on Shop, our digital shopping assistant, recently released a feature that allows buyers to favorite products and shops. By pressing a heart button on a product, buyers can save those products for later. When they do, the product image drops into the heart icon (containing a list of favorite products) in the navigation tab at the bottom.

In this post, I’ll show you how I approached implementing the Add to Favorite animation in Shopify’s Shop app.

A Data Scientist’s Guide To Measuring Product Success

By Willie Costello, Data Scientist

Open Discussion for Rubyists: April 12th

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