Scenes from Shopify HQ, Part 3: Some of the Rooms

It’s the end of the week, and my monthly check-in with Shopify HQ in Ottawa is drawing to a close. I fly home tonight at 9:10 p.m., arriving an hour later at Billy Bishop Airport, after which it’s a quick cab ride home to High Park. I thought I’d share some of my photos of the office before taking off.

This is a relatively new office, but it’s just what we needed. We were running out of space at the old place — it was already cramp when I joined as the 60th employee, and with the acquisition of the mobile dev company Select Start Studios, we’re now at 100.

The two pictures above are our reception area — we look like a real company now!

We’ve got a number of mottos that we live by at Shopify, and this one’s one of my favourites (you could say I’ve been doing this all along): Do things, tell people. Get stuff done and make sure people know about it. This one’s posted on the wall outside our CEO Toni Lutke’s office.

Tobi’s office is one of the more sedate rooms at Shopify HQ. The others, for which we were given budgets to decorate as we saw fit, are a good deal more colourful.

Every self-respecting software development shop understands the need to take a break from work and play videogames. Hence the games room, which features a nice-size TV, proper Street Fighter arcade-style controllers, an oft-used XBox 360 and a less-used Playstation 3.

And yes, a lot of posters catering to Anime fans. Anitra would love this room.

In addition to offices divided by function, we have a number of unassigned workspaces that people can use if they need some extra-quiet space to take a call or get work done. These rooms are themed, with themes determined and then implemented by employees (who were given decoration budgets, natch!). Here’s the Silly Hats room:

It features a fine set of chapeaux and a mirror so you can see how dashing you look when haberdashed:

The music room is one of my favourites:

Nice, quiet, low-lit and decorated with classic album covers, its a good place to get a little coding work done, do a conference call or even record some podcast audio (I’ve done all three).

Cool companies need cool workspaces, and Shopify is — as Outkast would’ve put it — ice cold. While Accordion City is home, I’m looking forward to my next visit in May.