tobi lutke Profile picture
Dec 19, 2022 14 tweets 4 min read Read on X
Some really cool (programming) tech that I think are underrated right now and that have proven very useful to me this year:
Apache Arrow system, Parquet, Datafusion are incredibly strong foundation for the next chapter in data. DuckDB is a delight as well. We are going towards much simpler stacks based on extremely well designed infrastructure and that's really becoming for the data world.
Configuration files, json/yml/toml can get messy and the schema stories are complicated. Cuelang.org, while taking a moment to fully appreciate, is a fantastic tool to unify all those with automation build in and effortless value type based schema. Highly recommended.
Distributed ids are a pain. You either end up with autoinc which has the delightfully named "german tank problem" or you end up with ugly uuids in urls. github.com/ulid/spec solves all that and should be available by default in mysql/pg/sqlite
(biased, but:) remix.run is the ideal way to make js based web development get the best from the server, the best from the client, and the most from the browser. It's as much fun to write remix as it is to write rails apps and that's a 10x improvement for JS imo.
Uber's H3 is a fantastic approach to geo indexing. uber.com/en-CA/blog/h3/ It's hard to use coordinates on a sphere and H3 feels like it hits the perfect sets of tradeoffs. You probably saw that our BFCM globe this year was hexagon based, that's because of H3. Image
Passkeys, you can play around with them on passkeys.io but hopefully you will see them everywhere soon. The web is bugged in that we didn't have a sane auth layer. This is the solution. The web will be 10x better with effortless secure authentication.
This is a bit long-tail but boy is zstd well designed. It's definitely the definitive compression approach. If you are building big data systems don't sleep on its ability to have shared generated dictionaries. Can lead to huge savings.
The matter / thread standards are extremely well designed. Forget everything you learned about home automation. It was all a mess before. Now the adults got together, set a really good technical foundation, and everyone is building on top of it. It will get very good now.
Rust and Zig are amazing programming languages. io_uring will change the way we design backend systems. Http3/Quic is superb
I guess the emergent theme here is that we (=tech industry) are dialing in the infrastructure. Arrow/Matter/Zstd/io_uring/passkeys/cue are all extremely well designed foundations to make building the fun stuff (in remix!) as simple and fast as possible. This is how it should be.
(and i put this list together right now by just searching for #GreatTech hashtag in my @logseq journal for the year, so logseq itself should get a shoutout as well)
And I forgot to mention nix. Yes it's still a mess, but its 100% worth learning and clearly the blueprint for how operating systems work in the future, and available now if you are willing to pay the learning curve tax.
And the best: Ruby itself. You may know that Shopify is investing heavily into yjit, which is now fully integrated into the release version of ruby. We are now starting to hit another gear of speedups that yjit can deliver. Stay tuned!

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More from @tobi

Mar 29, 2023
I just clued in how insane text2vid will get soon. As crazy as this sounds, we will be able to generate movies from just minor prompts and the path there is pretty clear.
Whisper allows very good transcription of existing videos and movies. Speaker detection is lacking but minor problem.
CLIP and Blip-2 are very good at extracting scene descriptions from still images, so you can also get set design, shot description and color grading.
When you feed scene transcript + scene description into GPT4 and prompt it to turn it into a movie script you get very good results. Also there are lots of movie scripts for real cinema floating around the internet which gets you ground truth.
Read 6 tweets
Dec 21, 2022
All storefront requests are now served by the latest version of ruby with YJIT enabled! We are seeing ~10% speedups across the board.

YJIT that has been developed by @Love2Code's and team at Shopify. Image
The latest ruby version also has Variable Width Allocation, which allows the VM to store bigger objects to improve data locality Image
and Object Shapes, which allows instance variable get and set operations to be faster in the interpreter, but especially under YJIT.
Read 6 tweets
Nov 26, 2022
Some extra Shopify BFCM data:

Purple is this year’s GMV

Looking strong despite the macro economical pessimism. That’s great news for independent commerce! Image
cumulative plot: Image
Read 5 tweets
Sep 16, 2022
Company news: We totally revamped our compensation system this summer. In short, "Flex Comp" now gives everyone a simple UX where you see your total compensation and choose a mix of Cash/RSU/Stock via simple sliders.
Shopify hires world-class, and we pay world-class compensation to match. But compensation is complex. We once polled hundreds of people who happened to make the same amount. We got widely different opinions on how much they thought they actually made!
Stock options/RSUs vest over years and are very dependent on market value when you join. This can create pretty absurd outcomes, like your lifetime earnings being vastly different if you joined the day after Russia invades Ukraine because of its effect on the market beta.
Read 8 tweets
Jul 19, 2022
Can't stop thinking about this and go: ☹️

"The reason we don't have fusion already is because we, as a civilization, never decided that it was a priority. Fusion funding is literally peanuts: In 2016, the US spent twice as much on peanut subsidies as on fusion research."
Every problem in the world is ultimately an energy problem if you dig few levels deep.

We choose to have energy problems.
Godspeed Helion, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, General Fusion. If you can, go work there.
Read 4 tweets
Apr 19, 2021
There really isn't such a thing as a meeting with more than 6 active participants. If it gets bigger it's really a panel or presentation where people should be able to enter and leave quietly. Clubhouse gets this very right. Who will build video chat clubhouse for companies?
It's probably not hard to build. Start with open source meet.jit.si or twilio.com/video. Allow pre-scheduling and invitation only events. Change the default to be a spectator after joining unless you are panelist.
Integrate some whiteboard (excalidraw.com!) and automatically record the sessions. Integrate rev.com to publish transcripts and make those searchable and link the transcripts to the right video frames.
Read 5 tweets

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