As Shopify? 35b (SQ) market cap vs 86b market cap (SHOP), SF vs Ottawa HQ, guess 4000 vs 6500 employees (based on linkedin numbers) is fairly close, but Square and Shopify are quite different.
It’s about providing a platform for enabling global commerce. Our engineering blog has other posts that goes into technical depth about a lot of the challenges we face, and our solutions. For context, here is some info about Black Friday/Cyber Monday for us last year: https://engineering.shopify.com/blogs/engineering/preparing-...
The limitation of Bors for us was throughput, we were more interested in testing multiple simultaneous pull requests merging at the same time, rather than testing against the latest master.
With our CI times and PR volume, by the time any CI run completes, master would have drastically changed.
Yes we have seen this before! The main difference is that throughput is extremely important for us, which we would not get worth Bors. Also, compatibility of multiple simultaneously merging PRs is the case that we are optimizing for, vs. compatibility with current master.
There is an explanation about how we handle this case when I talk about the failure-tolerance threshold. I go deeper into this in my GitHub Universe talk where I also talk about an alternative (but costlier) solution through running parallel branches, but unfortunately that talk is not posted up yet.
Pull requests are our unit of work, and the queue was created to support all pull requests. We do have feature flags as a tool, but we let our developers make the judgment call on how their changes should be rolled out.