One Month in At Shopify!

Like the headline says, I’m a month into my new job at Shopify and it’s going great! I thought people might be interested in hearing what it’s like getting started there.

What is Shopify?

You haven’t heard of Shopify? Where have you been?? Just kidding, it’s okay if you haven’t heard of them before :). Shopify is a web application that lets you set up an online store to sell your goods. It integrates with a tone of services for acceptings payments, shipping and anything else you might need to run an online store. This is all done using amazing technologies like Ruby on Rails, jQuery, Redis, AWS and much more. Did I mention we’re location in the ByWard Market in downtown Ottawa? Yes, it is awesome.

The First Day

So, my first day. The hours are pretty loose, people come in anywhere between 8 and 10am, I like to come in around 9 am myself. So I come in and I’m met by Brittany in HR and we start out with a bit of paperwork, then the fun begins. It starts out with getting a big gift bag with my ‘welcome package’ and what a welcome it is. Gift cards, some chocolate, a notebook and some Shopify schwage. Then we walk over to the one free desk in the main dev area, or ‘The Pit’, where I will be sitting. A nice big Cinema Display is already sitting there, but no laptop, we had to go over to the Apple Store and get a new one of those.

Once I’m all set with a desk and computer I spent a little time getting things installed, my dotfiles setup and Shopify checked out running. Next up I spent some time with Dennis Theisen who points me to a couple of bugs in the Partners Area of Shopify. I spent the rest of the day fixing the bugs Dennis assigned me and a few more things that I found along the way. I got to put some bug fixes into code review and the code went into the master branch that day and in production the next. I’ve got to say that is pretty satisfying; first day in and already committing code.

Day Two

For my second day I spent the morning pair programming with Jesse Storimer, continuing on the invoicing refactoring that I was helping him with during my interview pairing. It’s always fun working with Jesse, I always learn something new and on top of that he’s a VIM guy as well :). After the pairing I spent some time fixing up some of the other bugs I found in the Partners Area the day before. I’m probably skipping over all the fun stuff like going out to lunch in the ByWard Market, talking with some of my awesome new coworkers and all that stuff, but be sure lots of fun stuff is happening everyday.

The rest of the Month

The rest of the month has went by crazy fast and I’ve already gotten a chance to work on a lot of different things. I’ve done a little bit of work on ActiveMerchant, added SSL to the Partners Area, fixed a few IE and other bugs, some work with invoicing, Google Base and a little bit of work for the contest we just launched. A pretty busy month, but that’s the way I like it. Oh ya, I’m also working on a Shopify App in my Friday afternoon time. It has been great so far and I’m looking forward to every new day of it.

If any of this sounds pretty cool to you we are hiring for a number of different positions. If you want to know more just give me a shout or send in your resume.