The Zapier Engineering Blog

Everybody likes pie, right? There are many kinds of pie to choose from, you would think every pie would get eaten. Yet, every day many pies go uneaten, which is undeniably sad for the many who would want to eat that pie.

But this post is about APIs. Like pie,...

This article originally appeared as a guest post on StackShare.io.

This post is about a year old now, and most of these numbers are about double/triple (either in number of instances or instance sizing). We're actively investigating and rolling out Kubernetes for container orchestration and working on some performance...

At Zapier, we make a lot of outbound API requests. Almost 500 per second, to be exact. That means we spend a long time waiting for those APIs to get back to us—particularly if a popular service is experiencing issues. In fact, if you were to add up all the...

At Zapier, we like to test claims against facts.

With that in mind, we recently partnered with our friends at Typeform to validate the proclamation of the Zapier Developer Platform: "Make your app stickier than honey." That is, when an app integrates with Zapier (in effect, integrating with over...

If you haven't used React at all, you're in the right place. If you have used React, but you've run into some confusing edges, you're still in the right place. This guide covers all the basics as well...

One of the best aspects of Zapier's company culture is that the whole team does customer support. On top of that, we eat our own dog food—the Zapier team relies on many Zaps. Together, these practices give each teammate a stake in our customers' concerns, and they often expose us...

Back in January, we launched a new version of the Developer Platform – the place where companies can add their APIs to Zapier. Part of that project involved converting the existing views – standard Django forms – into Backbone.js views powered by a yet-to-be-written API. It was a fun project...

Lately, I've been working on a number of improvements to our continuous integration setup here at Zapier. It's a delicious combination of Jenkins, Docker and the Github Commit API that anyone can accomplish with a little work!

The Vision

Before delving into our continuous integration (CI) setup, it's important...

We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. ~Donald Knuth

It is unwise to embark on an optimization quest without first considering the famous quote by Knuth. However, sometimes that quick and hacky O(N^2) code you wrote (and...

def make_pie(self, ingredients):
    print '******WHAT IS GOING ON HERE******'
    print ingredients
    self.oven.preheat()
    print self.oven.temperature

Is the above code snippet similar to your tried-and-true debugging techniques? Yea, that used to be me too. Honestly, it's not so bad....