Rotational Security Interns

The internship will…

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…

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…

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…

Blameless Culture

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Sorbet: Type annotations for Ruby

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…

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…

Datadog App Analytics/Logs from One to N

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…

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…

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…

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…

Create a test data generator using Kafka Connect

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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…

A minimal Python client for talking to TensorFlow Serving

min-tfs-client is a minimal gRPC client for TensorFlow Serving that doesn’t depend on TensorFlow. TL;DR: min-tfs-client is a minimal python client for TensorFlow Serving that allows you to use serverless services (e.g. AWS Lambda) that have deployment size limits (250 Mb uncompressed, at time of writing). It works by removing TensorFlow as a dependency to create tensor protobufs for the prediction request. Feel free…

Having better One-on-Ones

1:1s are often my…

Making the most of Answer Bot: topic group visualization using t-SNE

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…

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…