There is so much potential in this. The beginning of a totally new modality of shopping. Extremely excited.

Sunday rant. For software engineering, my sense is that the phrase “premature optimization is the root of all evil” has massively backfired. Its from a book on data structures and mainly tried to dissuade people from prematurely write things in assembler. But the point was to free you up to think harder about the data structures to use, not leave things comically inefficient. This context is always skipped when it’s uttered. Not all fast software is world-class, but all world-class software is fast. Performance is _the_ killer feature. If you are in engineering, here is a fantastic anecdote. I refer to this account often. It’s a bit subtile, but the implications are massive- It’s an account of how SQLite became 50% faster, not by doing one specific thing but hundreds of small ones. SQLite is everywhere today because of this work. sqlite-users.sqlite.narkive.… We need the engineers in all companies fight for this more. Product leads are not the right owners of the end performance of the software. This needs to be encoded in the professional pride of the software engineering discipline. Leaders in companies need to encourage it and hold engineering accountable. It’s simply not ok to fritter away the performance of the products for random reasons. Every user of your products cares exactly as much about latency as engineers do when typing in their terminal. They just don’t have the words to describe what they don’t like about the experience and neither should they.

Shopify: The Boring Edition. We focused on the hard and unsexy work of nailing the basics, getting all the parts of Shopify to work seamlessly together, and run at tip top performance. You've got to sweat the details. Some of my favorite updates 🧵

Yesterday was an incredible day for our merchants and for Shopify: * Merchants drove a record-breaking $5 billion Black Friday in sales (GMV) * Peak sales / minute for yesterday = $4.6 million * Shopify's egress processed more than 173B requests * Peak requests per minute was at 284 million on edge, with more than 80 million on app servers pushing 12TB a minute * 45 million peak database queries per second, peak database writes was 7.6 million per second * We rely on Kafka. At peak we hit 66 million messages per second Let's keep going 🔥

BFCM Live on the @SphereVegas And I mean truly live! It turns out that the Sphere can be powered by the Unreal Engine, so of course we had to go there. Place an order from your phone, see it arc in front of you!

This is the energy. Let’s go

Here we go! 🌐 BFCM weekend has officially started in the first time zones, so let's go live. This is the best Live Globe experience yet. Beautiful. And what's even better than a bfcm globe? One in a room full with toys and tools to make it your own. We may have gotten a little bit carried away there... 😇