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…

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…

Recipes for running a successful technical book club at work

This blog post is our learnings from running technical book clubs at Zendesk for the past 2 years. In that time we have run four book clubs: Two books on functional programming languages: Clojure and Scala Reliability is very important to us so we studied the bible on Software Reliability…

The history of infrastructure at Zendesk (Part 3) — Foundation team forming and evolving

Introduction In Part 2, I wrote about our adventures moving from physical data centers to the Cloud. Let’s move on to how we transformed our organizational structure to take advantage of being in the Cloud and enable self-service. Building the foundation In early 2018, our organizational structure was stereotypically old…

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…

Collecting Build Metrics from Buddybuild

So after a long hiatus from writing, I’ve decided to try and be a bit more disciplined and write more frequently. This is the first in a series around how we have introduced build time tracking across our CI environments, and how we track it in our development tools. We…

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…

Adding Functionality to Google Pub/Sub: Queue Meta Processing

A Github Actions Workflow to Generate & Publish your Hugo Website

This short post describes a Github Actions workflow to generate your Hugo-based website and publish it to Github Pages. To learn more about Hugo and GitHub Pages, and how to use them to build your website, see my previous post. What is Github Actions Github Actions is a service from Github which allows you…

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…

Maintaining Binary Compatibility in Scala

Data Catalogs, the Luxury of Choice

Create a test data generator using Kafka Connect

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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…

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…

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…

The Joys of Circuit Breaking

Zendesk’s product suite is built with an evolving service oriented architecture, comprising hundreds of micro services and a growing web of interdependencies. Operating and orchestrating such a large scale distributed system can be challenging. This post will explore the importance of circuit breaking and related concepts. A few weeks ago…

Zendesk’s Global Mesh Network- Part 2

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

Datadog Log Management from Zero to One

Datadog APM Trace Search from Zero to One is the first part of advanced techniques we use at Zendesk to plan capacity and keep performance characteristics of the multi-tenant system at expected levels. Response times vary between different API endpoints and customers, as the data set grows rapidly, and new…

Hunting for Memory Leaks in Python applications

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…

How probable are collisions with ULID’s monotonic option?

There’s a lot of excitement at Zendesk about ULID. As a universally unique identifier format, ULID has become a popular alternative to UUID in recent years. For most of our history at Zendesk, we’ve used integer IDs internally for database keys, as well as in our public APIs. We even…

Open sourcing node-publisher

The dependency graph of our hypothetical package “A” We’ve just fixed an annoying bug in dependency C and our task is to propagate the fix up until package A. So…

Inclusion — getting the basics right around communication