The Zapier Engineering Blog

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...