What we talked about
Swati Swoboda traces her path from an eighth-grade research project on a library computer to leading development for Vault in Shopify’s Office of the CEO:work she calls “metaprogramming the company.” In this conversation, Swati and Federico dive into the arc of modern engineering: from Classic ASP and hand-editing production files to Rails’ elegant conventions, from code reviews to reading far more code than you write, and from individual craftsmanship to orchestrating AI agents at scale.
Show notes
Swati Swoboda’s job title, Development Manager for Vault in Shopify’s Office of the CEO, sounds technical until she explains what it actually means: she builds the software that controls how the entire company operates. Shopify’s CEO Toby Lutke reviews roughly a thousand active projects every four weeks through the system her team maintains, which is how a remote-first company with no central office keeps its founder in the details of every major decision.
What we covered
- The Vault is Shopify’s bespoke internal operating system: a project alignment tool, intranet, and live stream platform rolled into one. At any given time around a thousand projects live there, and Toby reviews half of them every four weeks. Every project goes through approval gates at prototype, build, and release, which Swati describes as a mechanism for transferring accountability upward so engineers get more autonomy in return.
- The GSD system inside the Vault requires engineers to document projects and get sign-off from senior leaders before proceeding. Swati is direct that this is bureaucracy, but she argues it is the least bureaucratic form of bureaucracy possible. The alternative is not no system; it’s a worse system. At Shopify, the gains in alignment and avoided rework justify the friction.
- Swati traces her interest in software to eighth grade, when her father sat her down at a library computer and told her to type Yahoo.com into the address bar. Watching search results appear for “Bolivia” made her want to understand how anyone had built something like that.
- Her path to Rails went through Classic ASP, then Java at Blackberry, then C# and .NET. She fought Rails when she first joined Shopify because she loved Visual Studio’s editor and felt lost without autocomplete. What converted her was realizing Rails didn’t need the editor as a crutch, the conventions are so predictable that she could write or read it almost anywhere, including in a console or plain text editor.
- On AI, Swati’s team of eight was generating around 100 pull requests a day at the time of recording, most of them AI-assisted. Her view is that engineers have effectively become engineering managers: they hold the business context, articulate the problem, direct agents to solve it, and review the output. The skills that matter most now are communication and understanding why something is being built, not just how to write the code.
- She draws a parallel to accountants and calculators: when Excel arrived, the number of accountants did not fall, more companies could afford to have accountants. Her prediction for software engineering follows the same pattern: fewer engineers per company, but far more companies with engineers, and a collective increase in the total number of engineers working on harder problems than before.
About Swati
Swati Swoboda is a Development Manager for Vault in Shopify’s Office of the CEO, where she builds the internal tooling that shapes how Shopify operates as a company. She previously led the shipping platform and foreign exchange multi-currency teams at Shopify.
- LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/sswoboda
- Website: https://shopify.com
Episode 96 of the PreVetted Podcast.