Organizations and layers of abstraction

This post is a reflection on being part of making a maturing infrastructure organization for nearly five years.When I joined Production Engineering at Shopify, it was barely 30 people. We went for a team dinner around that time and I remember how my manager paid for it with his credit card because points. Now we are at >200 people, and at the last pre-pandemic offsite we had a huge ballroom booked for the dinner. Clearly it wasn’t billed to an individual’s credit card.Through my there years there, I’ve seen how we’ve solved scalability and growth by introducing boundaries and new levels of abstraction.Now that I’m noticing this pattern at other companies too, I believe that managing layers of abstraction is the key tool to solving scalability problems.