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…

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…

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

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…

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…

iOS How-to — Add Adaptive constraints to support a Universal App

Device screen size (e.g iPhone or iPad) Device Orientation (portrait or landscape) Adaptation (multi-tasking on iPad) In this post, we will learn how to add NSLayoutConstraints…

Datadog App Analytics/Logs from One to N

Zendesk’s Global Mesh Network- Part 1

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…

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…

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…

Rotational Security Interns

The internship will…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Foldable Go

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Add Some Smarts To Your Change Data Capture

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