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…

Maintaining Binary Compatibility in Scala

What will we leave behind?

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Running a team colocation — The beginning of something great

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…

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…

Zendesk’s Global Mesh Network- Part 2

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…

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…

Sorbet: Type annotations for Ruby

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…

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…

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…

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…

Hunting for Memory Leaks in Python applications

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…

Add Some Smarts To Your Change Data Capture

As the number of your services grows, it becomes error prone and hard…

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…

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…

Blameless Culture

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…

Create a test data generator using Kafka Connect

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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…

Chaos Engineering comes to Ruby

In a micro-service environment, an unexpected service outage often comes as a surprise and when it happens it’s stressful for engineers, managers, and the clients. If you want to prepare your Ruby application for the next surprise and prevent it early then this post is for you. I will show…