Zalando Engineering Blog
engineering.zalando.com · Company blog · on HN since 2020
Zalando's engineering team writes about running large-scale systems at the European e-commerce company, including Kubernetes, Postgres, load balancing, and ML.
What HN saysHN commenters mainly link it and share related experience, such as running a paper reading group; no strong opinions appear in the given comments.
20HN people shared it
2linked it in comments
19stories submitted
30story points
2 months agolast shared
2020people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Agentic Engineering at Zalando: A Snapshot3 people · 6 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 2Client-Side Load Balancing at a Million Requests per Second2 people · 3 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 3A Systematic Approach to Reducing Technical Debt1 people · 3 points · first shared 2021 · 1 comments on HN
- 4Contributing to Debezium: Fixing Logical Replication at Scale1 people · 2 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 5All you need to know about timeouts1 people · 2 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 6Technology Choices at Zalando – Updating Our Tech Radar Process (2020)1 people · 2 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 7PgBouncer on Kubernetes and how to achieve minimal latency1 people · 2 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 8Zalando's Machine Learning Platform1 people · 2 points · first shared 2022 · discussion on HN
- 9Using Modules for Testcontainers with Golang1 people · 1 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 10LLM powered migration of UI component libraries1 people · 1 points · first shared 2025 · 1 comments on HN
- 11Zalando Prepares for Cyber Week1 people · 1 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 12In-Process Consistent Hash Load Balancing at a Million Requests per Second1 people · 1 points · first shared 2026 · 2 comments on HN
- 13The Day Our Own Queries DoS'ed Us: Inside Zalando Search1 people · 1 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 14Inbox Zero is not a Lifestyle1 people · 1 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 15Investment Insights from Two Years of AI-Powered Postmortem Analysis1 people · 1 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
mohitk05 · 2026-03-23
Congratulations on the five year mark! I co-run a similar paper reading group at Zalando (European e-commerce) and recently shared our learnings/experience[1] of running such a group for over a year and I'm happy to see so many similarities.
We focus our papers around distributed systems, software engineering and languages and try to cover more ground on the applications of the concepts discussed in the papers. The blog post also contains a "blueprint" for someone who is looking to start a similar group.
What has driven the meetups throughout the year is we being two organisers, driving the topic ourselves by preparing a presentation (not everyone would have the time to pre-read) and making the format conversational/open - very similar to what Armaan (op) shared.
One of our recent experiments was doing a collab with the Berlin Systems Group[2] where we organised an external-facing event in Berlin with attendees from outside our organisation. I was so happy to see a nice small group turn up for the event and thoroughly enjoy it!
[1] https://engineering.zalando.com/posts/2026/01/running-an-engineering-p…
[2] https://luma.com/y9edbih7
abraxaz · 2022-07-09
Nice graph, have you considered making it a directed graph, and also assigning more explicit semantic meaning to the edges?
So for example, using turtle syntax [1], instead of
<https://engineering.zalando.com/posts/2022/04/functional-tests-with-te… <http://example.com/graph-edge> <https://www.testcontainers.org/>
have
<https://engineering.zalando.com/posts/2022/04/functional-tests-with-te… <http://purl.org/dc/terms/subject> <https://www.testcontainers.org/>
The semantics of http://purl.org/dc/terms/subject is given at the url itself, but in brief:
> A topic of the resource.
> Recommended practice is to refer to the subject with a URI. If this is not possible or feasible, a literal value that identifies the subject may be provided. Both should preferably refer to a subject in a controlled vocabulary.
This would be similar to how wikidata expresses knowledge [2]:
<http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q28315661> <http://www.wikidata.org/prop/direct/P921> <http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q750997>
Or in English:
"Go To Statement Considered Harmful"(Q28315661)'s "main subject"(P921) is "goto"(Q750997)
This also makes it easier to query [4], for example, you could get all articles covering a "goto" with the following SPARQL[5] query:
SELECT ?item WHERE
{ ?item <http://www.wikidata.org/prop/direct/P921> <http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q750997> }
May help to read the RDF primer [3] also.
[1]: https://www.w3.org/TR/turtle/
[2]:…