The core shopify codebase is a monolithic one, hence the merging infrastructure described in the post. It's not a "single project" in any useful definition of the phrase.
Im interested how what looks to me like a fairly standard web store could have such an enormous amount if developers working on it. Is there some kind of insane complexity behind webstores I am not seeing here?
It’s about providing a platform for enabling global commerce. Our engineering blog has other posts that goes into technical depth about a lot of the challenges we face, and our solutions. For context, here is some info about Black Friday/Cyber Monday for us last year: https://engineering.shopify.com/blogs/engineering/preparing-...
I understand its a hugely popular service and there is a lot that goes in to something so big but there are bigger websites that run on much much smaller teams of developers. I just don't understand how there is even enough surface area on the app that 1000 people could be working on it at the same time. Is that number counting people working on the ops stuff or building other tooling not part of the main app?