Having better One-on-Ones

1:1s are often my…

Composable Go

With a lot of languages, it is easy to replace a given function or method call with a mocked version. Dynamically replacing or statically injecting mocked dependencies makes testing code much easier. Personally I’ve found this approach less than ideal in Go, so I’ve been looking for another way to…

Machine learning is blossoming at Zendesk

Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure! A Short History of Machine Learning at Zendesk We have invested heavily in ML over the past four years and we…

Leading Machine Learning at Zendesk

I recently participated in an interview series covering careers in emerging technology fields on the French website TOM.travel. I’ve been leading machine learning at Zendesk for the last 6 years and over that time we’ve grown from two people in Melbourne to tens of people on three continents. I discussed…

Creating the ultimate flexibility via Container components in React

React Components / Zendesk Garden This documentation includes React components and utilities that provide visuals, keyboard-navigation, localization, and…garden.zendesk.com I wrote a Twitter thread on some of the cool stuff we’ve done that could be very useful as a starter for other people. So here’s that thread with some extra goodies, in article form. We’ve utilised a really cool pattern…

Running a team colocation — The beginning of something great

How we run gamedays in Talk

While we can sometimes see our products as simply a bundle of operations with corresponding Service Level Indicators and Objectives, we also need to keep in mind the human factor responsible for maintaining these agreements. Introduction This article idea came after a 2019 EMEA SREcon talk that strongly resonated with me…

Say Hi to Delivery Boy!

Hot off the heels of releasing Racecar, our easy-to-use framework for running Kafka consumers in Ruby, we’re ready to release yet another Kafka-related library! This time, it’s all about message delivery. Up until now, if you wanted to produce messages to Kafka from a Rails application, you’d need to write…

Racecar v2: A New Foundation

It’s been three years since we introduced Racecar, a simple framework for building Kafka consumer applications that worked seamlessly with or without Ruby on Rails. With Racecar, building a consumer application for processing…

Data store migrations with no downtime

Data store migrations can be complex, especially if the application cannot afford to have maintenance downtime. We will explore some strategies that can help you navigate the complexity. In our case, it was a migration from a NoSQL data store, DynamoDB into a relational data store, MySQL. However, this post…

Performing Kubernetes Service CIDR Block Migration

History At Zendesk, we started our Kubernetes journey in September 2015, shortly after version 1.0 was publicly available. At the time of v1.0 not much information was available and we didn’t have a lot of experience, so some configuration choices that made sense four years ago have had to be reconsidered…

The Dawn of Zendesk’s Machine Learning Model Building Platform with AWS Batch

This article focuses on the new model…

Xcode 10’s build system and Code Generation (R.swift)

R.swift is an open source library which makes it both easier and type-safe to use resources such as images, fonts, and segues. It’s a really cool library, and we have used it successfully at Zendesk for quite a while now. However… The Problem When building a project which uses R.swift with Xcode 10, the build will fail with the following error: error: Build input file cannot be found: /LOCATION/R.generated.swift Why This Happens R.swift is integrated into projects using an Xcode build script phase. This phase generates a Swift file, R.generated.swift, which is compiled when the project is built. The build fails because Xcode 10, with its new parallelizing build system, is trying to locate the R.generated.swift file before it has been created. The Solution Xcode 10 allows us to specify an output file for a build script phase. We can add our R.generated.swift file as an output file as follows: Adding our R.generated.swift file as an output file in our Xcode build script phase This results in a successful build. Awesome! 🎉 Additional When we encountered this initially, we opened a bug with R.swift. However, as shown above, the issue is due to changes in Xcode’s build system. That’s it! 📱🚀👍🏽 Also available on petethedeveloper.com

Running a team colocation — The TL;DR

NO to over-planning, YES to #COLOYOLO Don’t over-plan and take it easy! Make it a working week, don’t try to overload it with meetings. Just remember…

pakkr™ (Part I), One Pipeline to Rule Them All

Co-Author This blog is a collaborative effort with Eric Pak. Prequel This is a story of how we, data scientists and machine learning engineers in Zendesk, came out of the dark age of machine learning tooling, built our in-house tooling pakkr pipeline, and shared it with the world. The Dark Age: Life Pre-pakkr and How We Came Here Nowadays, many companies talk…

A minimal Python client for talking to TensorFlow Serving

min-tfs-client is a minimal gRPC client for TensorFlow Serving that doesn’t depend on TensorFlow. TL;DR: min-tfs-client is a minimal python client for TensorFlow Serving that allows you to use serverless services (e.g. AWS Lambda) that have deployment size limits (250 Mb uncompressed, at time of writing). It works by removing TensorFlow as a dependency to create tensor protobufs for the prediction request. Feel free…

Zendesk’s Global Mesh Network- Part 1

The history of infrastructure at Zendesk (Part 1) — constant tradeoffs

Sorbet: Type annotations for Ruby

Implementing mTLS and Securing Apache Kafka at Zendesk

This article was originally posted on the Confluent blog at https://www.confluent.io/blog/how-zendesk-secures-kafka-with-mtls-authentication-system/ Background At Zendesk, Apache Kafka® is one of our foundational services for distributing events among different internal systems. We have pods, which can be thought of as isolated cloud environments where our products run, spread out all across the world…

Inclusion — getting the basics right around communication

How we improved the observability of a Go project

Background About a year ago, my team took over responsibility for an event driven system written in Go. One of our first steps was to understand what the application does, and how it does it. The app already had stdout logging, rollbar notifications, datadog statsd metrics, and pager alerts. The previous…

What will we leave behind?

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Running a team colocation — Days of the week

The Friday before In preparation for the co-location week, we started off by sending a survey to gather: Everyone’s objective for the week List of questions they’d like answers for by the end of…

Documentation: it’s more than words

Software development is as much about communication as it is about functionality. At its core, code reflects business processes and business logic. Software never exists solely in a vacuum, it is surrounded by both context and people. Tracking the history of a business and its software becomes an increasingly important…