Having better One-on-Ones

1:1s are often my…

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…

Create a test data generator using Kafka Connect

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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…

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…

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…

The history of infrastructure at Zendesk (Part 2) — the messy middle

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…

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…

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…

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

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…

Foldable Go

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…

Zendesk’s Global Mesh Network- Part 1

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…

Maintaining Binary Compatibility in Scala

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

Kafka on 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…

Zendesk’s Global Mesh Network- Part 2

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…

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…

What will we leave behind?

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Add Some Smarts To Your Change Data Capture

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