The Zapier Engineering Blog

When you've worked with as many APIs as we have (230+), people start to ask what the best APIs look like. Naturally, we point to things like great documentation, endpoints that follow consistent conventions, human readable error messages, and standard authentication methods. But one thing that makes a big difference...

Tell me if you're familiar with this scenario. You develop a handful of web applications and backend services at your company. As a result, for local development you need the following installed.

• mysql
• redis
• rabbitmq
• nginx
• elasticsearch
• graylog2

But that's not all! The work you do with a team located...

new Worker(workerUrl);

If you are like I was a couple weeks ago, the above JavaScript statement means very little to you. I came across it while digging in the source code of the Ace Editor. After searching the code base and the web, I discovered it was...

Do not consider this a complete benchmark, this is just a quick comparison I ran in 5 or so spare minutes on a Saturday. Comparing m1.medium on AWS to Medium on Azure, I selected the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS disk image, ran these commands:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:rwky/redis
$ sudo apt-get...

Every month Zapier makes hundreds of millions of requests to third party APIs on behalf of our customers. With such scale, problems arise. Naturally, some creative solutions crop up ins response: this blog regales the tales of the technical side of Zapier.

Expect long diatribes about various pieces of tech:...