by Gabe Hoffman This is part 1 of a series on my experiences in my first year as a software engineering lead at Chick-fil-A, focusing on modernizing our critical Point-of-Sale infrastructure. My Story I enjoy doing hard things. Ever since I started programming when I was ten, I’ve relished the complexity of…

by Mac Macoy In a recent post, we shared why we chose Apache Airflow to orchestrate Machine Learning pipelines at Chick-fil-A. In this post we’ll dive deeper into how we enhanced Airflow to support data versioning for Machine Learning. Airflow at its Core Airflow at its core is a workflow orchestration tool, and it’s…

by Brian Chambers A few years ago, I participated in a fun panel about the relevance of Enterprise Architecture (EA) in a cloud-centric, product-focused, DevOps world. We discussed some existential questions for EA such as: Does an Enterprise Architecture practice even make sense anymore? …

by Christopher Lane Today, a significant portion of our sales are flowing through our digital channels, including The Chick-fil-A App and chick-fil-a.com. We have seen significant growth in these channels since March 2020, when the impacts of COVID-19 started in North America. Our digital properties are powered by our Digital…

by Keith Schaefer & Daniel Hager You know those articles, the ones an R&D wing of a big company put out that purport to be doing really cool stuff with technology? You read the article, get excited about the idea, then years later you think to yourself, “Hey whatever happened…

Written on October 22, 2018 by Keith Schaefer & Alain Nicolet The Black Box problem At Chick-fil-A, we are working to build a smarter restaurant. We want to connect, analyze and automate our restaurants as much as possible to help our business scale, increase our restaurant capacity, and make the…

Written on December 6, 2018 by Christopher Lane, Jamey Hammock, & Brian Chambers In this post, we will share about the architecture behind north-south routing and traffic shaping in the API tier of our Chick-fil-A One mobile application. Scaling Chick-fil-A One Chick-fil-A’s mobile application continues to be one of the…

Reducing “cowtages” and improving “refryability.” Written on October 5, 2018 by Caleb Hurd and Laura Jauch Technology has become [nearly] as critical to Chick-fil-A’s growth and success as the delicious sandwiches we deliver and the “my pleasure” you receive in our restaurants. …

Written on June 25, 2018 by Brian Chambers, Caleb Hurd, and Alex Crane At full scale Chick-fil-A will be running Kubernetes at the Edge in each of our 2000 restaurants. That means roughly 6000 devices at the Edge running Kubernetes. One of the biggest challenges associated with this is bare…