Successfully Merging the Work of 1000+ Developers - Shopify

What this post added

This post details the development of Merge Queue v2, an upgrade to Shopify's system for managing code merges into the main branch. Key technical contributions include: replacing the browser extension with a comment-based interface (`/shipit` command), integrating with GitHub's GraphQL API for reactions and branch protection, implementing a 'predictive branch' strategy for running CI before merging, developing a reconciliation algorithm to manage the predictive branch state, and introducing a failure-tolerance threshold to handle flaky tests. The post also discusses batching pull requests into deployable units (batch size of 8) to optimize throughput and risk.