Shopify do biannual updates to their platform. They call them editions.

Their most recent, “Winter ‘25”, was dubbed “The Boring Edition”.

While the previous edition was focused on helping businesses expand into new markets, this one was about catching up on technical debt.

In their words, “smoothing rough edges, improving performance, and making sure everything works well together.”

According to Glen Coates, VP of Product, it was more about “integrating our existing feature set than adding new features.”

I thought this was worth talking about because it provides a real example of that even a company the size of Shopify sweeps things under the rug for later.

As an aside, they attribute some of these lacking integrations to the fact that features are worked on by single teams who didn’t collaborate with the teams of related features. This is sometimes know as “shipping the org chart” or Conway’s Law.

I’ll be using this example when explaining to founders the inevitability of some technical debt.

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If you’re interested, Shopify take an unusual amount of care with their release site. You can see it here: https://www.shopify.com/au/editions/all