Software Craftsmanship

This September, we quietly launched a new version of the Shopify admin. Unlike the launch of the previous major iteration of our admin, this version did not include a major overhaul of the visual design, and for the most part, would have gone largely unnoticed by the user.

Why would we rebuild our admin without providing any noticeable differences to our users? At Shopify, we strongly believe that any decision should be able to be questioned at any time. In late 2013, we started to question whether our framework was still working for us. This post will discuss the problems in the previous version of our admin, and how we decided that it was time to switch frameworks.

One of the problems with bash is that it's simply obsolete code. We have modern objective standards about code quality, and bash doesn't meet those standards. In this post, I'm going to review the code, starting with the function that is at the heart of the #shellshock bug, initialize_shell_variables().