Validating Cloud Custodian on AWS with Moto

At Zendesk, we adopted Cloud Custodian as a framework to implement compliance across our AWS accounts. Cloud Custodian has a Domain Specific Language that allows anyone with a penchant for reading documentation to create policies that can report or act on resources in AWS, GCP, or Azure. Deleting or re-configuring…

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…

Running a team colocation — The beginning of something great

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…

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…

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…

Code Coverage and Xcode

Key to unit testing is code coverage…

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

This article focuses on the new model…

Datadog APM Trace Search from Zero to One

Trace Search and Analytics by Datadog HQ is a fantastic tool for performance analysis and capacity planning. Trace Search has been in Beta over the past year and was announced for General Availability at Dashcon.io. Please see the keynote, related workshop and also its Github repo. In this blogpost we…

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…

Zendesk’s Global Mesh Network- Part 1

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…

Having better One-on-Ones

1:1s are often my…

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…

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…

I have a problem with 1on1 questions…

1on1s can be hard. If you’re a manager you have probably seen multiple articles offering the quick fix of questions to ask your team… A 30 second online search turned up pages of articles with catchy clickbait titles like: One on One Meeting Questions Asked By Great Managers! Top 10…

The science behind consolidating Answer Bot production Models: Part 1

At Zendesk, we believe that great customer service builds strong customer relationships and that Machine Learning ( ML ) can play a powerful role in creating good customer experiences. Whether it is enhancing search tools or powering entire self-service systems, ML has the…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…