Thomas Countz

I’m a senior engineer and tech lead on the Ruby infrastructure team at Zendesk.

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

• 2025
  • conferences
    • Kraków Ruby Users Group #4 2025
      • Dependency Tax: What We’re Learning About Managing Gem Upgrades
    • Ruby Community Conference 2025 Winter Edition
      • How Zendesk Upgraded a Monolith to Rails 8.0 Overnight
    • Zendesk Tech Summit 2025 (Internal)
      • Rails Doesn’t Need to Scale; We Do
• 2024
  • conferences
    • An Afternoon with Matz (Internal)
• 2023
  • conferences
    • RailsConf 2023
      • Merged PRs: An Untapped Resource for Practice and Exploration
• 2022
  • conferences
    • RailsConf 2022
      • Leveling Up from Planning to Production
  • podcasts
    • Collaborative Craft
      • Aaron Patterson - Just in Time: Hands-On Learning
• 2021
  • podcasts
    • 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
  • company_blogs
    • Sargable Queries & MUL Indexes; or Why My Query is Slow
• 2020
  • company_blogs
    • Dare to be Good Enough—You’ll be Happier for it
• 2019
  • company_blogs
    • Essential & Relevant: A Unit Test Balancing Act

Github • Mastodon • Bluesky • LinkedIn