ZEN and the art of Reliability Zendesk’s reliability principles and the real-world stories as we transitioned from a humble IT help desk software to providing mission critical systems for enterprises. Zendesk handles approximately 250,000 requests per second at daily peak into our infrastructure, with over ½ of those requests needing…

Zendesk has built out a global engineering team spread across four continents, nine countries and 10 cities around the world. We started the journey relatively early in our company’s life, it’s been difficult, and we’ve learned lessons along the way. Many of the things we got right, came from key…

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…

In my last post interviewing Zendesk’s co-founder, Morten Primdahl, we talked about Zendesk’s infrastructure development from 2006 to 2012, when we started growing like crazy and put out the first burning fires. This time, I’ll be looking at 2012 to 2017. This period of Zendesk’s history taught us that infrastructure…

A great tweet from Julia Evans got me thinking about 1:1s. So many of us are exploring the potential of one-on-ones every week. I have personally had some amazing conversations and learned so much from trying different things. I thought I’d capture my journey so far. 1:1s are often my…

I think Zendesk’s infrastructure journey is an important story to tell. Our path will always be unique to Zendesk, but our story will probably resonate with companies who were growing around the same time. The story of our growth is one we’ve often told internally, as new engineers have joined…

Blameless culture has been on my mind recently. Aspects of it can be seen in the Toyota Production System, however, only more recently did “blameless” start to be used to describe it. …

I feel really passionate about making my workplace inclusive, an environment where everyone is respected and also feels respected. It’s something I never really thought about until joining the workforce and I’m thrilled it’s often a topic of discussion. …