Zach McCormick
Hello, my name is

Zach McCormick

Zach is a Senior Staff Engineer at Braze, where he designs and leads large-scale platform work across its Data and Orchestration divisions. Over 15 years he has worked as an engineer, engineering manager, startup co-founder, and independent consultant across marketing automation, fintech, IoT, healthcare, and mobile security. He focuses on architectures that let organizations scale by giving teams independent ownership of their systems, and on running global-scale distributed systems reliably.

Latest Posts

How Braze Leverages Ruby at Scale

How Braze Leverages Ruby at Scale

  • Thu 18 Aug 2022
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If you’re an engineer who reads Hacker News, Developer Twitter, or any other similar information sources out there, you’ve almost certainly come across a thousand articles with titles like the “Speed of Rust vs C”, “What Makes Node.js Faster Than Java?”, or “Why You Should Use Golang and How to Get Started.” These articles generally make the case that there’s …
Connected Content And The Slashdot Effect (Or How I Learned To Scale APIs)

Connected Content And The Slashdot Effect (Or How I Learned To Scale APIs)

  • Thu 20 Jun 2019
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One of the coolest ways our customers integrate with our product is through a feature we call Connected Content. By utilizing custom HTTP endpoints—either owned by the customer or via one of their partners—our customers can inject customized, on-demand content into messages right before they’re sent. Customers use this for a huge variety of use cases, such as personalized recommendations, …
Achieving Resiliency With Queues: Building A System That Never Skips A Beat In A Billion

Achieving Resiliency With Queues: Building A System That Never Skips A Beat In A Billion

  • Thu 20 Dec 2018
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Braze processes billions and billions of events per day on behalf of its customers, resulting in billions of hyper-focused, personalized messages—but failing to send one of those messages has consequences. To make sure those key messages are always correct and always on time, Braze takes a strategic approach to how we leverage job queues. What’s a Job Queue? A typical …
Code Vision

Code Vision

  • Mon 18 Jun 2018
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While I'm currently on an early flight from Indianapolis to Newark, I'd love to expound on some thoughts I've had recently about what I call "code vision". I define this as a written, iterated-on plan for what a codebase should look like in the future. This is different from what features are in the pipeline - think more of a …
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Zach McCormick

Interested in chatting?

I'm always happy to chat about software engineering challenges of all sorts - architecture, organizational, or otherwise. Just drop me an email at zachary.tyler.mccormick@gmail.com.
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