The Zapier Engineering Blog

If you're reading this article, you're probably wondering a few things:

1. What the heck is Qim?
2. What the heck do I mean by "symmetrically"?
3. Is "JavaScript cake" a useful analogy or just an attempt to be clever?
4. How do I pronounce Qim?

So, let me try to answer those right...

As startups grow, we need to make tweaks to the way we work. I’ve found this especially true in engineering. As a co-founder and CTO, my own role has changed a lot over the years. My everyday duties and challenges have shifted, and I’ve had to alter my approach multiple...

Chances are, if you’re building an app you’d like it to be a great app. There are many things that go into making something great, from solving important problems to user experience and more. We believe extensibility is one of those aspects. Users want to their apps to integrate...

Every API integration comes to life the same way. Someone reads the API docs for a service's endpoints, writes some code to get things connected, and boom, the integration is born!

There's only one problem. Every API integration ages slowly over time, and eventually has a "retirement date" lurking...

You don't have to start out as a developer—I didn't. You can start out in any career, and then work your way into an engineering position. Depending on your company structure, you might have your work cut out for you. I was fortunate that Zapier's management was deeply encouraging when...

When we started building our first version of the Zapier developer platform in 2012, we were unsure if engineers would devote much time to building apps on Zapier. At that time we had only around 10,000 users—so we focused on a browser interface that lets anyone build Zapier apps, regardless...

For all the benefits that a remote office offers, there are times when I wish I could roll my chair over to a coworker's desk for a minute and chat through a complicated bug or tough technical decision. Asynchronous communication doesn’t always work for those tricker issues. Thankfully, the last...

Downtime happens, even to the Internet’s largest players. While 100% uptime is the goal, no engineer actually expects it. That’s why we talk about uptime in terms of "the number of nines.” For example, five nines refers to 99.999% uptime, which means a system is inaccessible less than one second...

After working with hundreds of SaaS APIs, we’ve noticed plenty of best practices–and a handful of anti-patterns–of a technical nature. It’s rarely the status codes or authentication mechanisms that make the difference with these integrations. There’s a human element that is much more important, as we’ve noticed expanding Zapier from...

Redux is a simple library that helps you manage the state of your JavaScript app. Despite that simplicity, it's easy to fall down rabbit holes when learning it. I often find myself explaining Redux, and almost always start by showing how I'd implement it. So that's what we'll do here:...