E31 - Distributed Systems at Shopify with Ahmad Alhour

Staff software engineer Ahmad joined me to share insights from designing complex systems at Shopify. We discussed distributed systems, managing technology landscapes, testing strategies, flexible architectures, leadership skills, understanding roles, and optimizing teams.

Key takeaways involve tackling uncertainty, tailoring methods to teams versus rigid recipes, testing guiding principles over metrics, solving business challenges, and incrementally converging on solutions via hypothesis testing.