The Zapier Engineering Blog

No app can go it alone. Your customers use a slew of tools to keep their business going, and you can't win when you're working against their workflow.

Zapier gives you and your customers access to more than 750 integrations that help your app fit into any scenario. They don't...

Anybody who has spent time chatting with me at one of our Zapier retreats or listening to one of my Friday lightning talks can attest that I think Go is a great programming language. In this post I’ll share why I think it's great, some cons of using it, and...

While these days I spend a majority of my time focused more on infrastructure engineering to scale Zapier, a lot of time during the early days was spent mixing engineering work with connecting new external APIs to our development platform. I always had a sweet spot for OAuth 2.0-based APIs...

I love the winter in Minnesota. The long, cold, dark nights are a great time to curl up with a warm laptop and work on an "outrageously geeky" project. I also love LEDs, and connecting them with microprocessors/computers. Combining the three would make a great project.

For many months, I've...

Some of a developer's most powerful tools call the command line home. Source control like git and cloud services like Heroku are mainstays in an engineering workflow—and they're the tools we use daily to manage the code that runs Zapier.

So we got to thinking, shouldn't you be able to...

Simon Charette

Zapier would not exist without open source software. From backend frameworks like Django and Celery, to frontend libraries like React.js, open source makes up a large percentage of our codebase. We are thankful for the individuals who maintain these projects. We are also curious: What is it like...

There are thousands of APIs. That means that there are a lot of bad APIs. More importantly, there are many good APIs. We can learn from both, as you look to enable what developers (and the users they support) need from your API.

At its basic level, an API is...

For an API to be a powerful extension of a product, it almost certainly needs authentication. By building API calls that can read, write, and delete user data, you can magnify an app’s influence on its users’ lives. So, if authentication is a given, the method is the real choice....

When it comes to an API, when asking who uses it you might think the answer is obvious: “Developers, developers, developers!”

While it will probably be a developer who writes the code to integrate with your API, they aren’t always the ones to discover the API. In fact, a developer...

To some, the command line is a relic of computing’s past. But as a developer tool, the command line is essential. Managing local processes and source control are often done through Command Line Interfaces (CLIs). In recent years, another kind of CLI has become popular, and it extends beyond the...