Inclusion — getting the basics right around communication

Sorbet: Type annotations for Ruby

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…

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…

Adding Functionality to Google Pub/Sub: Queue Meta Processing

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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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…

Blameless Culture

Hunting for Memory Leaks in Python applications

The Dawn of Zendesk’s Machine Learning Model Building Platform with AWS Batch

This article focuses on the new model…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Datadog APM Trace Search from Zero to One

Trace Search and Analytics by Datadog HQ is a fantastic tool for performance analysis and capacity planning. Trace Search has been in Beta over the past year and was announced for General Availability at Dashcon.io. Please see the keynote, related workshop and also its Github repo. In this blogpost we…

Add Some Smarts To Your Change Data Capture

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

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…

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…

Zendesk’s Global Mesh Network- Part 1

How we use AWS Batch at Zendesk to Build All The Machine Learning Models

In this instalment, I’ll be describing…

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…