Preparing Hobbii for a single-cutover Shopify migration
Context
Hobbii is a global e-commerce platform for yarn and crafts. When I joined in 2022, the backend was a large monolith that a 28-developer team was afraid to touch. Deployments were risky, ownership was siloed, and everything the business wanted to ship got slower.
My role
I came in as Lead Backend Developer to stabilize the platform. Later I became Lead Software Architect to redesign it, and I finished as Engineering Manager for the Crafter & Designer product team.
What we did
We spent the first six months stabilizing the platform before changing its architecture. We rolled out a repeatable development process across all 28 developers, with shared accountability and quality practices.
Then we broke the monolith apart. I designed a domain-driven service structure that reduced coupling, so developers could work in smaller, safer systems. Services talked to each other through events and could evolve independently. I mentored developers in core engineering principles using the systems they worked in every day.
We spent over a year on foundations before the business saw the migration benefit.
Outcome
That work made a single-cutover migration to Shopify possible. It had previously been considered impossible, but the migration was completed without a parallel-run period. Developers also shared responsibility for systems that had previously belonged to individual people or teams.