New York

October 15–17, 2025

Berlin

November 3–4, 2025

London

June 2–3, 2026

Designing software to maximize developer productivity

Having worked extensively in the Shopify codebase, one of the largest rails apps in existence, I have experienced firsthand some of the downsides of working in monolithic codebases.

Speakers: Kirsten Westeinde

July 21, 2020

Having worked extensively in the Shopify codebase, one of the largest rails apps in existence, I have experienced firsthand some of the downsides of working in monolithic codebases. These include painfully slow tests, new code causing unexpected repercussions due to dependencies across functional boundaries, and decreased developer productivity due to the need to understand the entire codebase to be effective in it.

During this talk, I will discuss how to identify these symptoms and others that are tell-tale signs that the monolithic architecture is no longer serving you. Once identified, I will walk through the architecture.