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Farhan Thawar: evaluation

19 Dec 2024 Lenny's Podcast How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng)

“One is, the more context you can fit in your head around a code base. And you can never really fit all of Shopify in your head, because it's a big complicated set of tools we give to merchants.”

— Farhan Thawar

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Speaker
Farhan Thawar
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
evaluation
Recorded
19 Dec 2024
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

Transcript context

…This episode is brought to you by Vanta. When it comes to ensuring your company has top-notch security practices, things get complicated fast. Now, you can assess risk, secure the trust of your customers, and automate compliance for SOC 2, ISO 7001, HIPAA and more with a single platform, Vanta. Vanta's market leading trust management platform helps you monitor compliance, alongside reporting and tracking risk. Plus, you can save hours by completing security questionnaires with Vanta AI. Join thousands of global companies that use Vanta to automate evidence collection, unify risk management, and streamline security reviews. Get $1,000 off Vanta when you go to Vanta.com/lenny. That's V-A-N-T-A.com/lenny. Wait, talk about more about this. So, there's been a drive to delete code and simplify. What's behind that? What's going on there? Yeah, so there's a few things, right? One is, the more context you can fit in your head around a code base. And you can never really fit all of Shopify in your head, because it's a big complicated set of tools we give to merchants. But, the more you can simplify, the much easier everything becomes, resiliency, performance, reliability, maintainability, all the illities become much, much, much easier when the code base is simple. Now, all you need really is the mandate of like, "Oh, well, let's look at this code. And, if I could start this today, would I really build this thing? Or do I now have enough domain expertise to say, 'Oh no, this is the right solution?' So can I delete start over and build this more easily?" And now, everything else becomes easy to build on top of. And so, routinely, we have a delete code club, we have hack days, which happens two or three times a year, where there's always one team that is focused on deleting code. They even have a manual, "Here's how to find things to delete." And, it's amazing. We almost always delete. I don't know if this is good or bad. We can always almost find a million plus lines of code delete, which is insane. But, at the same time, I applaud the teams for going after the cruft and the code base. And everything gets easier, right? Codelets loads faster. It's easier to understand. This is why when I look at GitHub stats, you shouldn't really look at... I think Google put out and said, "Oh, 25% of all code is now written by AI." I'm like, "Where's the delete? Where is the 25% of all code is deleted by AI?" Right? This is where we have to start thinking about it. Because, the right code is never the volumous lines of code metric. It's always something else. It's always elegance. And that's where we have to think about. So, it is something that, as part of us being long-term infrastructure thinking, we really do care about that. I love this, in part, because it connects to the topic we're talking about, which is speed, velocity, intensity, smaller code base, cleaner, better code base allows you to move faster. I used to be an engineer actually. But, both my engineering brain and my PM brain, I love the idea of killing stuff that's useless, fixing, making code cleaner, and better, and more durable. In reality, very hard for companies to prioritize this thing. Is there anything you found that helps you do that? You mentioned hack days and weeks are one part of that. Probably helps that Toby's an engineer and he understands the value of this stuff. But I guess, for folks that want to do this more, any advice?…

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