Issue 174 - Interview with Shopify's Head of Engineering

This collection of content covers Shopify, its engineering culture, and apps that extend its functionality. **Farhan Thawar's Engineering Leadership at Shopify:** Farhan Thawar, Head of Engineering at Shopify, cultivates a unique engineering culture focused on intensity, urgency, and first-principles thinking within a fully remote team of over 10,000. He champions pair programming, embraces challenging paths for better outcomes, and has a unique "no-interview" hiring process. He aims to build a "crafter's paradise" and has created one of the world's largest internship programs. **Shopify Ajax API Tutorial:** A video tutorial details using Shopify's Ajax API for tasks like managing customer carts, displaying product recommendations, and predictive search. It covers various endpoints, including getting cart contents, adding/updating/removing items, handling errors, adding line item properties and cart attributes, and clearing the cart. It also touches on the product API for fetching product information. The tutorial emphasizes that the API is unauthenticated and has limitations regarding accessing customer/order data or updating store data. It notes that localizing the endpoints might be necessary for multi-market stores. **Strike Automatic Discounts App:** A video promotes the Strike Automatic Discounts app, highlighting its ability to create complex discount campaigns beyond Shopify's native functionalities. The app allows for automatic discounts based on customer tags, email domains, metafield values, date ranges, and minimum purchase amounts. The video demonstrates creating a discount for customers who have provided their t-shirt size via a custom form, leveraging metafields for targeting. **Zapiet's Point of Sale Extensions:** A conversation between Koshi from Shopify and Andy from Zapiet discusses the latter's point-of-sale (POS) extensions for Shopify. Zapiet focuses on pickup and delivery solutions, and their POS extensions streamline order management, scheduling, and real-time food ordering. The discussion highlights the significant improvements offered by Shopify's new POS UI extensions compared to the older App Bridge, particularly in terms of load speed and ease of development. They also discuss Zapiet's approach of gathering feedback directly from merchants to develop features like SMS notifications for POS orders. Andy emphasizes the importance of localizing extensions from day one to cater to diverse language needs. Zapiet also offers "Zapiet Eats," a solution for restauranteurs with features such as real-time food ordering, deliveries, table reservations, and tableside ordering.