What agriculture and car manufacturing can teach us about the use of generative AI in software engineering It’s not often that an article about AI coding tools takes us back a few centuries. Come with me on a trip down memory lane to revisit a couple of lessons other industries learned long ago. In the 1840s, the German chemist Justus…
Zendesk
https://medium.com/zendesk-engineering · 10 posts · history since 2024 · active
16 Mar
25 Feb
The first time you realize you’re a safe leader, it feels like a victory. People tell you the truth sooner. They admit mistakes instead of hiding them. They bring you the messy thing instead of the polished story. The team takes more calculated risks, and the work gets better. If you care deeply about people — and if you’re reading…
8 Sept 2025
Heartbeats: How Synthetic Traffic Keeps Us Running Let me take you on a journey of how we came to use heartbeats in our application design. It’s a happy story of love and no broken hearts along the way. What are heartbeats? What my teams have called heartbeats are a form of synthetic traffic generated by the application itself. The deployed…
30 Jun 2025
You may be new to this series; and if so welcome! If so, I encourage you to start at the beginning of our datastore journey and see the blog post “ Unlocking Efficiency: A New Era for Datastore Provisioning ”. Already up to date in our series? MAGICAL — then let’s continue with a quick re-cap. Where are we? We…
19 Jun 2025
In the fast-paced world of engineering, the dream of easy infrastructure management and provisioning is a common aspiration. At Zendesk, this sentiment resonates deeply among our engineers. When we talk about infrastructure, we refer to a wide range of tools such as MySQL, S3, DynamoDB, Kafka topics, compute resources, network and routing configurations, security groups, secrets, credentials, configuration settings, dashboards,…
8 Jun 2025
Are you ready for more self-service datastore adventures? If you haven’t already, have a look at our previous entries in this series: Unlocking Efficiency: A New Era for Datastore Provisioning Simplifying Datastore Provisioning with Kubernetes Operators Resolving Incidents With The Remote Incident Console They’re a fun read. The story so far Last time, in Simplifying Datastore Provisioning with Kubernetes Operators…
28 May 2025
Supporting developers to debug and resolve issues with datastores in the Self-Service ecosystem. Welcome to the third blog post of our Self-Service Datastore series, where we share our journey towards creating a more efficient and reliable way to manage datastores at Zendesk. Previous blog posts: Unlocking Efficiency: A New Era for Datastore Provisioning Simplifying Datastore Provisioning with Kubernetes Operators We…
14 Mar 2025
A brutally simple and effective implementation for long-running account move jobs at Zendesk. This article outlines some architectural changes we’ve been able to make to radically simplify the execution model of long-running jobs. By leveraging client behaviour, the resulting system improves overall functionality while removing the many complexities of distributed job execution. Dall-e impression of a server who’s ready to…
10 Feb 2025
Leading while learning Why great managers don’t have all the answers I used to think leaders had to have all the right answers. Now I know that the best ones have all the right questions. Early in my career, I admired managers who seemed to have everything figured out. They spoke with certainty, made quick decisions, and never hesitated. I…
2 Dec 2024
Introduction Welcome to the second blog post of our Self-Service Datastore series, where we share our journey towards creating a more efficient and reliable way to manage datastores at Zendesk. In today’s dynamic application development landscape, the ability to swiftly provision datastores is crucial for maintaining agility and delivering exceptional user experiences. Provisioning encompasses all steps involved in requesting a…