Illustration Management and Discovery Tooling

Shopify has developed and enhanced tools and strategies for managing and discovering visual assets, specifically illustrations, across Shopify's large and distributed codebase. Initial efforts focused on the challenges of updating illustration styles and the fragmentation of assets across thousands of repositories. This post details the creation of `@shopify/get-repo-images`, an open-source tool built in Go, which enables illustrators and developers to efficiently find illustrations and their references in code across multiple repositories. The tool was rewritten from Node.js to Go for significant performance improvements, reducing build times from over 35 minutes to 8 minutes.