Dad, husband, programmer. Engineering Manager at Shopify
London
Joined December 2008
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Reuben retweeted
Now you can integrate Shop Pay as a standalone wallet for *any* transaction, not just on purchases from Shopify stores.
Use Shop Pay on tickets, on food, and so much more.
Reuben retweeted
the javascript people are reinventing Rails for the fifth time
Benefits of the CAFE stack (@Cloudflare + @alchemy_run + @foldkit + @EffectTS_) for building software with coding agents:
1. Agents invent less architecture. They focus on product-level execution within a well-defined architecture. You build faster, with more confidence. You focus on what makes your product unique.
2. Your codebase becomes semantically rich. Intent and meaning are explicit rather than left for future agents to infer. Each new agent spends fewer tokens reconstructing intent.
3. Tests read like executable behavioral specs. Expected behavior is easy to inspect, and both humans and agents can verify implementations against it.
4. Strong conventions result in remarkably legible AI-generated code. Agents do what you expect more often, with less steering. The codebase feels consistent and predictable.
5. Explicitness makes behavior clear. Unexpected magic has fewer places to hide. Diffs are easier to review. Yes, it’s more LoC, but who cares when you’re not writing it by hand?
Reuben retweeted
I’m working with Metafields and Metaobjects these days as well, what can we do to make them better?
Reuben retweeted
Mediocrity is always invisible until passion shows up and exposes it
— Michael Ovitz
Reuben retweeted
AI build out is similar in a lot of ways to the railroad build out of the 1800s.
Pennsylvania and New York Central in 1880s realized that they could not spend their competitors into bankruptcy, so they started asking for federal regulation of industry.
Reuben retweeted
modern travel is increasingly flying 10 hours to experience a slightly different version of the same globally optimized lifestyle.
same third wave coffee. same natural wine bar. same brutalist menu. same sourdough. same beige hotel. same tasteful ceramics. same instagram lighting.
what a ridiculous convergence.
Reuben retweeted
github issue page has been HTTP 500 for me for half a day so a colleague sent a PDF of the issue page. Never thought we'd be there.
Reuben retweeted
Training tiny models for special purpose use cases works so incredibly well if you have a great self improving recursive flywheel. Shopify ML team is on fire.
finetuned 0.8b model beats GPT 5.6-sol xhigh in this very specialized task.
Reuben retweeted
Concerns about water & power are real—and need to be addressed—but understand that every time you see a tweet that data centers are destroying the world…
…that the Chinese communists are spending millions trying to convince you to believe that.
Reuben retweeted
My favourite project at @Shopify Hack Days is the #DeadCodeClub
Last summer we deleted 5m line of code (LOC)
At Summit in July we just deleted 15M LOC 🤯
Everything gets better when you delete unused code — build times, maintainability, deployments, etc
We use a combo of static analysis, observability traces, and human judgement pairing with an LLM to find these
We also have a *gardening* skill in River (our company wide harness) that proactively helps you identify + fix these over time — so you don't have to wait for the next Hack Days 💪🏽
Reuben retweeted
The first step of any meaningful pursuit is to severely underestimate its difficulty
—Sara Hooker
Reuben retweeted
The funny thing about Anthropic and OpenAI people saying they want to slow down AI progress is that this is what Anti Trust mechanisms were built for.
It's illegal to collude and slow down AI progress. – at Scotts Valley, CA
We support this petition, signed by our CEO, several co-founders, and senior staff.
Our own research on recursive self-improvement, published last month, points to the need for tools to deliberately pace the frontier of AI development so society can prepare. We’re glad to see broad agreement across the field. pacingthefrontier.com/
Reuben retweeted
App Home, now as a UI extension.
Build your app's landing page directly in the Shopify admin with no backend required.
Available in API version 2026-07 for custom-distribution apps.
This work from @emilie_noel and @kirshatrov is one of the most elegant solutions to a really tough distributed systems problem
shopify.engineering/scaling-…
