Web Foundation

My first role at Shopify was part of the Web Foundation team, which was initially responsible for our migration from a Ruby on Rails stack to a React stack. This was a monumental task that involved a lot of work on the part of the team, but it was a great opportunity to learn establish myself as a core contributor to the company. We set standards and stewards for our opinionated approach to building complex web applications in this new JavaScript-foreward way.

This required expert-level understanding of the web platform and associated technologies –our stack consisted of NodeJS, React, TypeScript, GraphQL– while also designing, building and maintaining the foundational tools that power the testing, development, build/deploy infrastructure and common application libraries that all other teams across the company depended on. Aspects of good performance and developer experience tooling were the keys to success in this work.

Resiliency

As a experiment for myself, I spent a year working on the Resiliency team, which was responsible for building the infrastructure and tooling to help Shopify stay online globally. In order to succeed under the pressure of incident response, I needed to quickly level up my cloud infrastructure skills including designing and operating large scale Kubernetes clusters, and building tools to help us when responding to incidents.

Luckily this was during the pandemic, so I was able to study the Google SRE books and use it as a means to distract myself from the global situation. I also relocated from Toronto to Berlin as part of this move and was responsible for building the European incident response team. While I think of this time as one of the most difficult in my career, it was also a time where I learned the most and was exposed to every nook and crany of the Shopify ecosystem.

Hydrogen

In my final role at Shopify, I contributed to the development of Hydrogen, an open-source React framework designed for building custom storefronts optimized for Shopify’s ecosystem. Our goal was to empower developers with a performant, opinionated starting point for headless commerce, balancing flexibility with ease of use, and dynamic alternative to our liquid templating system.

Hydrogen was built on modern web technologies like React Server Components and Vite, but when Shopify acquired Remix, we combined forces with Ryan Florence and Michael Jackson to pivot Hydrogen as a commerce-focused layer on top of Remix. My role involved contributing to the core Hydrogen library, such as pagination and SEO primitives, and to the overal developer experience in the Command Line Interface (CLI) and editor tools, while also providing support to the community and ongoing documentation.

This work underscored my passion for creating powerful, design-forward systems that simplify complex workflows while enabling creative expression. As I have moved on from Shopify, I am unsure if Hydrogen remains a key part of Shopify’s vision for the future of headless commerce, but I’m proud to have contributed to its foundation among the other great people on the team.