Most companies at scale rewrite their early technology choices. Shopify took the opposite path. During Black Friday 2025, they processed 90 petabytes of data, handled 14.8 trillion database queries, and peaked at 489 million requests per minute—all while running one of the largest Ruby on Rails monoliths in production.

How a simple HTML-to-Markdown converter became essential infrastructure for agentic AI workflows

In the fast-paced world of technology and business, there’s a certain allure to being the go-to person. The one everyone turns to when a critical system goes down, or a complex problem needs solving. You’re the expert, the guru, the Subject Matter Expert (SME). And that feels good. But there’s a subtle, yet dangerous, line you can cross, transforming yourself from an invaluable asset into a Single Point of Failure (SPF).