Thomas Countz

I’m a Staff Engineer and Tech Lead on the Ruby infrastructure team at Zendesk.

My career is guided by three core goals: to create, to learn, and to share.

• ~
  • 2026
    • ↗ Zendesk
      • Staff Software Engineer, Tech Lead
  • 2025
    • ⌘ Kraków Ruby Users Group
      • Dependency Tax: What We’re Learning About Managing Gem Upgrades
    • ⌘ Ruby Community Conference Winter Edition
      • How Zendesk Upgraded a Monolith to Rails 8.0 Overnight
    • ⌘ Zendesk Internal Tech Summit
      • Rails Doesn’t Need to Scale; We Do
  • 2024
    • ⌘ Zendesk Internal Keynote
      • An Afternoon Chat with Matz
  • 2023
    • ⌘ RailsConf
      • Merged PRs: An Untapped Resource for Practice and Exploration
  • 2022
    • ⌘ RailsConf
      • Leveling Up from Planning to Production
    • ♪ Collaborative Craft
      • Aaron Patterson - Just in Time: Hands-On Learning
  • 2021
    • ↗ Zendesk
      • Senior Software Engineer, Tech Lead
    • ♪ Collaborative Craft
      • Charity Majors - Into the Unknown Unknowns: Observability
      • Coraline Ehmke - Know Your History: Ethical Source
      • Hana Lee - It’s a Process: More than Machine Learning
      • Kofi Gumbs - Stealing Fire: Ambitious Side Projects
      • Eva PenzeyMoog - Tech’s Pre-seatbelt Phase
      • Jon Wettersten - How Design Works
    • ¶ 8th Light Engineering Blog
      • Sargable Queries & MUL Indexes; or Why My Query is Slow
  • 2020
    • ↗ 8th Light
      • Senior Software Engineer
    • ¶ 8th Light Engineering Blog
      • Dare to be Good Enough—You’ll be Happier for it
  • 2019
    • ¶ 8th Light Engineering Blog
      • Essential & Relevant: A Unit Test Balancing Act
  • 2018
    • ↗ 8th Light
      • Software Engineer
  • 2017
    • ↗ Rescuing Leftover Cuisine
      • Ruby on Rails Developer

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