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…

Having better One-on-Ones

1:1s are often my…

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…

Rotational Security Interns

The internship will…

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…

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…

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

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

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…

What will we leave behind?

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The history of infrastructure at Zendesk (Part 1) — constant tradeoffs

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

Zendesk’s Global Mesh Network- Part 2

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…

Adding Functionality to Google Pub/Sub: Queue Meta Processing

Running a team colocation — The TL;DR

NO to over-planning, YES to #COLOYOLO Don’t over-plan and take it easy! Make it a working week, don’t try to overload it with meetings. Just remember…

Building user confidence in machine learning products

I’m a Software Engineer on the Data Products team at Zendesk. Recently I had one of the highlights of my career — working in the team that built Answer Bot. As a front-end specialist, my focus was on crafting the best possible user experience for Zendesk customers…

The science behind consolidating Answer Bot production Models: Part 2

In the previous post (Part 1), we introduced the issue of consolidating the six production models that are used to provide multilingual support for Answer Bot at Zendesk into a single model. Consolidating these models both simplifies our deployment process for new models, while providing a potentially more scalable solution…

10 tips for growing a globally distributed engineering team

Maintaining Binary Compatibility in Scala

Say Hi to Delivery Boy!

Hot off the heels of releasing Racecar, our easy-to-use framework for running Kafka consumers in Ruby, we’re ready to release yet another Kafka-related library! This time, it’s all about message delivery. Up until now, if you wanted to produce messages to Kafka from a Rails application, you’d need to write…

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…

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…

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…