Zendesk’s Global Mesh Network- Part 2

Open sourcing IronBank, our Zuora client

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…

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…

Hunting for Memory Leaks in Python applications

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…

10 tips for growing a globally distributed engineering team

How we improved the observability of a Go project

Background About a year ago, my team took over responsibility for an event driven system written in Go. One of our first steps was to understand what the application does, and how it does it. The app already had stdout logging, rollbar notifications, datadog statsd metrics, and pager alerts. The previous…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Sorbet: Type annotations for Ruby

Foldable Go

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 App Analytics/Logs from One to N

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…

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…

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…

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…

App Onboarding with SwiftUI

Onboarding is the process of helping users to understand an app, and hopefully, encouraging them to continue to use it. Onboarding flows usually consist of one or more screens explaining how a user can use the app, and often involve some input from the user, e.g signing up, logging in…

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…

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…

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

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…