Thoughts on Infinite Games

Then I would be my own locomotive,
trailing behind me as I returned to work
little puffs of smoke,
indicators of progress,
signs of industry and thought,
the signal that told the nineteenth century
it was moving forward. - Billy Collins, The Best Cigarette

When I joined Shopify a few years ago, the appeal was open source. The open source efforts that Shopify drove were part of a positive sum company that made Shopify who it was, engaged in the infinite games of technology and commerce. The CEO is a dyed in the wool open source believer, as gh commits can attest. One of the keynote speeches at the yearly company summit was a wonderful history lesson / illustrative animated video production about open source roots, hacker roots, the MIT Tech Model Railroad Club, and so on. Filled with beautiful analogies and visualizations, it must've represented hundreds of hours worth of work from co-workers to put together. I walked away from that day (well, got up from my company provided Herman Miller office chair) feeling a real sense of "right" ness. It's a beautiful technical story to believe in, it "makes the work light".

Like I said at Summit, Shopify is playing the infinite game. We are building a company that will likely outlive all of us. Playing the infinite game well means that more players get to play and the game continues long after our modest roles in it. Said in another way: we need to remember that everyone will leave at some point and that’s totally OK. - https://news.shopify.com/building-for-the-future

Anyway it was a nice day. Interest rates are higher now. I was recently told, very professionally and with earnest effort from coworkers and managers and so on, that I would be leaving Shopify. It's been a really thoughtful severance package, I am quite fortunate.

I intend no disparagement by saying that I wish them way more than luck. They spent lots of time and effort creating a totally new flexible compensation structure and so needless to say I am very invested in the success of the company. Judging by the big increase in the stock price, the results seem to speak for themselves.

We’re building a 100-year company

Shopify builds for the long term, and that means investing in our planet so that we can future proof Shopify and help our merchants future proof their businesses, too. - https://www.shopify.com/about

Companies need flexibility. A 100-year company, in practice, means a company that handles changes dynamically. What are 100 year companies, in practice? Consolidated Edison in NYC sent me a bill for years, and 100 years ago Consolidated Edison sent my forefathers bills, and so on (some of my forefathers may have still been in the shtetl at that time, tbh). Somewhere along the way the folks in charge of the Edison Illuminating Company and it’s various entities, maybe Thomas Edison himself, needed to make an important change in technical or professional focus, the way it is often important for companies to focus and invest in different Open Source domains. That's part of being a lifelong learner as a crafter or IC too, taking on new domains because that is where the bleeding edge is found. Maybe Shopify leadership is like Thomas Edison and Rails, Ruby, LLMs, YJIT, Rack, Trilogy, TruffleRuby, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Thanos, and all the other awesome OSS stuff that Shopify helps on are like the lightbulb, their own little version of a lightbulb. That would be nice. At least, isn’t it pretty to think so?

The trick for good ICs seems to be balancing learning new domains with the day to day energy required for software development and maintenance. It can be hard. The work must be done. Maybe the role of an IC/crafter is to be a locomotive’s “little puffs of smoke / indicators of progress”, to borrow from the Billy Collins poem at the top of this post. Little pieces of coal being burnt up in pursuit of that halcyon 19th century industrial progress.

Here we are, Mark Zuckerberg has decided now is the time to build the metaverse. So enormous wheels are turning and resources are flowing and the efforts are definitely going to be made. The big challenge now is to try to take all of this energy and make sure it goes to something positive and we’re able build something with real near term user value.
- John Carmack, 2021 Connect Keynote

Anyway I hope Shopify stock keeps going up, and wish my former coworkers there all the best in pursuit of things like real near term user value. They're sharp folks.