The Shopify migration that was considered impossible

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

The first six months were about stability, not architecture. We turned an unreliable platform into a stable one and rolled out a repeatable development process across all 28 developers. Accountability and quality practices came first. Nothing else sticks without them.

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. The new architecture doubled as a training ground: I mentored developers in core engineering principles using the systems they already worked in every day.

The honest trade-off: we spent over a year on foundations before the business saw the headline payoff.

Outcome

The groundwork made a one-go migration to Shopify possible. It had previously been considered impossible, and it happened without a parallel-run period or a multi-year limbo. The culture changed along the way too, from siloed ownership to shared responsibility.

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If your platform has become something your team is afraid to touch, that's a solvable problem. See how I work or get in touch.