Zach Sherman
About Zach Sherman
Zach Sherman is an Infrastructure Engineer at ngrok, where he has worked since 2021. He has a background in software development and community organizing, with experience in improving user experience and automating processes.
Work at ngrok
Zach Sherman has served as an Infrastructure Engineer at ngrok since 2021, contributing to the company's operations in Oakland, California. His responsibilities include migrating ngrok's logging infrastructure from Cloudwatch to Datadog, which improved issue correlation across services. He has also led user experience enhancements for the monorepo developer environment using Nix for dependency management. Additionally, Zach automated the release process for the ngrok agent with Drone and implemented a tracing-first observability approach using the otel-collector and Honeycomb. His efforts have resulted in reduced continuous integration times by migrating from CircleCI to a self-hosted Drone and Buildkit setup on Kubernetes and AWS EC2.
Education and Expertise
Zach Sherman earned a Bachelor of Arts with Honors in Latin American Studies and a Minor in Media Arts + Design from the University of Chicago, completing his studies from 2015 to 2019. His academic background has equipped him with analytical skills and a diverse perspective, which he applies in his professional endeavors. Zach's expertise in software development is complemented by his experience in community organizing, which informs his approach to building relationships and problem-solving in technical environments.
Previous Work Experience
Before joining ngrok, Zach Sherman worked in various roles that contributed to his development as a software engineer. He was a Frontend Engineer at Repl.it for one month in 2020, where he gained experience in frontend development. Prior to that, he served as a Product Engineer at Open Work Labs for four months in 2019. He also worked as a Researcher and Artist at the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago for eight months. Earlier in his career, Zach interned as a Research Intern at Cumberland River Compact in 2016.
Technical Contributions
Zach Sherman has made significant technical contributions at ngrok, including the development and maintenance of the ngrok agent's packaging across multiple platforms such as Docker, Snap, Homebrew, and Chocolatey. He created a custom TypeScript program to simplify Kubernetes and Docker configurations for product engineers, enhancing workflow efficiency. His initiatives in automating processes and improving observability have streamlined operations within the organization.