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…

Running a team colocation — The beginning of something great

Kafka on Ruby

Adding Functionality to Google Pub/Sub: Queue Meta Processing

Open sourcing IronBank, our Zuora client

Let’s make a message encoder in Ruby

Binary message encoding is a common pattern in modern distributed systems. Tools like Protobuf, Avro and Thrift are increasingly used to decrease payload size and provide typed contracts for message produces and consumers. Many developers will need to utilise these tools at some point, but they can be opaque and…

The science behind consolidating Answer Bot production Models: Part 2

In the previous post (Part 1), we introduced the issue of consolidating the six production models that are used to provide multilingual support for Answer Bot at Zendesk into a single model. Consolidating these models both simplifies our deployment process for new models, while providing a potentially more scalable solution…

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…

Zendesk’s Global Mesh Network- Part 2

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…

Having better One-on-Ones

1:1s are often my…

Zendesk ML Model Building Pipeline on AWS Batch: Monitoring and Load Testing

The series started with Wai Chee Yau’s exploration of AWS Batch and why we ended up choosing it…

Foldable Go

Going Where our Team has not Gone Before

How to plan out where you’re going when you don’t know how you’re going to get there. Organising a data science team’s research direction is a challenge in itself and there’s no algorithm with which to optimise it. This quarter our team is trying something new. Generally when our data…

Making the most of Answer Bot: topic group visualization using t-SNE

Zendesk’s journey to Kubernetes

We can use Kubernetes for little things, but there isn’t much point doing it for our original monolithic Ruby on Rails product. Even if we did…

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

This article focuses on the new model…

Xcode Quick Tip – Testing your layout for localization

Recently we encountered buggy UI component positioning when the device language was changed from the default language (English). This is shown below with Dutch. UI component (UISwitch) incorrectly positioned due to ambiguous constraints Due…

How we use AWS Batch at Zendesk to Build All The Machine Learning Models

In this instalment, I’ll be describing…

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

Blameless Culture

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…

Building user confidence in machine learning products

I’m a Software Engineer on the Data Products team at Zendesk. Recently I had one of the highlights of my career — working in the team that built Answer Bot. As a front-end specialist, my focus was on crafting the best possible user experience for Zendesk customers…

A Beginners Guide to Deploys and Releases

The process of releasing software to users at scale is one that can be particularly confusing for new software engineers, as most don’t have exposure to this part of the software development process until their first internship or job. I found this to be the case during my time at…

Part 2 — Zendesk Spotlight: Our Career-Changer Engineers.

Following on from Zendesk Spotlight: Our Career-Changer Engineers I received so many words of wisdom from our career-changer engineers that it was clearly worth sharing it with the world. And judging by your response to Part 1 you think so too! Here is what they had to say. Catherine Software Engineer…