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…

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…

Create a test data generator using Kafka Connect

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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…

App Onboarding with SwiftUI

Onboarding is the process of helping users to understand an app, and hopefully, encouraging them to continue to use it. Onboarding flows usually consist of one or more screens explaining how a user can use the app, and often involve some input from the user, e.g signing up, logging in…

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…

An investigation into Kafka Log Compaction

Background At Zendesk, we have been using Kafka in production for several years. Primarily we have been using it to distribute events between services. For example, “a ticket has been changed, and this is what changed”. We are now considering using Kafka to share entities between systems. For example, each time…

10 tips for growing a globally distributed engineering team

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…

Datadog App Analytics/Logs from One to N

Sorbet: Type annotations for Ruby

React containers, some assembly required

Previously, I’ve written about the container pattern we use in our React components in the Zendesk Garden design system. They render no UI, handle keyboard and mouse interaction, and support RTL layouts. I believe this pattern has a lot of merit but its…

The history of infrastructure at Zendesk (Part 2) — the messy middle

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…

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…

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…

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…

Running a team colocation — The beginning of something great

Reverse engineering Sketch’s resizing functionality

My first mission has been diving into the world of rendering our react components back into Sketch, a design tool, to keep the final components in sync. Standing on the shoulders of others, I have…

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

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…

Zendesk Spotlight: Our Career-Changer Engineers.

(Part One) Zendesk Engineering in Melbourne is growing, and growing fast. Four years ago we had five engineering teams and now there is somewhere in the vicinity of thirty. One of the pillars of this rapid growth has been the hiring of career changers — folks who have decided to shift their…

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…

Evaluating Apache Pulsar

Zendesk currently use Kafka, primarily for publishing of events. We are also considering publishing the state of entities to Kafka, using compacted topics to keep only the latest version of an entity. We do this already, but are considering it for much larger data sets. These compacted topics will be…

Hunting for Memory Leaks in Python applications