Six Lessons from Six Months at Shopify by Alex Danco

First, there’s this note on Conway’s Law (“You ship your org chart”):

The original wording from Melvin Conway goes: “Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication system.”...

Think about any complex product you like – it could be your phone, your car, a public transit system; whatever. That product is composed of many different parts, and sub parts, all the way down to tiny little atomic units that feel like indivisible “chunks” of product. Conway’s law is an observation about the contours of those chunks of product....boundaries between chunks of product mirror communication boundaries inside the org.

Then there’s this point about software saturation:

there is so much software...I forget who said this – someone smart on Twitter – but your mental idea of the software business changes when you realize that the primary customer of software is becoming other software.

This stuck out to me because just a couple days before I had seen GitLab’s “Tech Stack Details” where they openly enumerate (all?) of the software they use. The list is huge, over 160 pieces of software.