Joined 15 years ago
Also if you find any mistakes I'd be happy to correct them!
We're not using zoom, but google meet - but yes, these happen completely online now.
I find that people that are doing interesting stuff often _want_ to talk about it. However, a big part of Shopify culture is "do things, tell people" - it is definitely encouraged to spend time spreading context.
It's not directly part of any rewards framework, but one metric that goes into promotions is the area of impact. By giving a talk to the guild, you can have impact on a group that's larger than your team, potentially the whole organization. It counts.
But another reward is the positive feedback, interesting discussions and new connections that you make through this.
I should have included this in the blog post: The number of components _needs_ to be kept small. Shopify's main monolith is 2.8 million lines of code in 37 components, and I'd actually like to get that number _down_.
I like to compare this to the main navigation that we present to our merchants. It's useful if it has 8 entries. It's not useful if it has 400.
In a way, components are the main navigation to our code base. A developer should be able to look at what's in our "components" folder and get a general impression of what the system's capabilities are.
Can you expand on that? I'm not sure I follow.
Also, the first try of drawing boundaries will always be varying degrees of wrong. If you have very strong boundaries at this stage, iterating on them, moving responsibilities around, can be harder.
Also, with the right tooling it's definitely possible to harden monolith internal boundaries to a comparable level.
I can see though how many smaller companies would not be in a position to build that tooling.
Anyway... there is no either / or here, as I've explained in another comment. What if you have components within a monolith, but each component has its own database, for example? What if test suites are completely isolated, so that tests for component A can not access code in component B?
You can get pretty strong boundaries with a few comparably simple tricks.
We don't use "hardware" or "VMs" to facilitate modularity.
