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…

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

This article focuses on the new model…

SwiftUI & UIView — A Simple Mistake

I recently made a simple mistake. An implementation which appeared correct, based on its initial usage, turned out to be incorrect when its usage changed. But before we start, although this post describes the mistake I made and shows you how…

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…

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…

Maintaining Binary Compatibility in Scala

Leading Machine Learning at Zendesk

I recently participated in an interview series covering careers in emerging technology fields on the French website TOM.travel. I’ve been leading machine learning at Zendesk for the last 6 years and over that time we’ve grown from two people in Melbourne to tens of people on three continents. I discussed…

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…

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…

Open sourcing IronBank, our Zuora client

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…

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…

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…

Adding Functionality to Google Pub/Sub: Queue Meta Processing

Data Catalogs, the Luxury of Choice

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…

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…

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…

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…

Add Some Smarts To Your Change Data Capture

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

What will we leave behind?

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Running a team colocation — Days of the week

The Friday before In preparation for the co-location week, we started off by sending a survey to gather: Everyone’s objective for the week List of questions they’d like answers for by the end of…

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…