“There is a lot of valuable information in this Slack, but whenever I come back to find it, it’s gone because of the 10,000 message limit. Can we move this community to Discord, which has persistent message history?” That message, from a community member in the Zeebe Slack, triggered a DevRel project that resulted in the Slack Archivist – a Slack bot that allows valuable conversations to be archived from the community Slack to a dedicated searchable topic in our Discourse-powered Forum. The Problem Slack is ubiquitous. You probably have it open right now, and are in several different Slack teams. We use Slack internally at Camunda, on a paid plan, and when it came time to stand something up...

This month marks the 20th anniversary of the Open Source Erlang language and the Erlang virtual machine. Renowned for its reliability, the ability to hot-patch running code, and the Actor model, Erlang has been incredibly influential in software development, particularly in scalable distributed systems. If you look through the Zeebe source code, you’ll see Actor components sprinkled throughout. Zeebe core engineer Deepthi Akkoorath did her PhD thesis in Scalable Consistency in the Multi-core Era and is a huge fan of Erlang. Here is a video of Deepthi describing the architecture of Zeebe, the workflow engine powering Camunda Cloud: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbXKgQQmukE A couple of months ago, I wrote a statistics collector for the Camunda DevRel team. You can see the project in...

One of the things that I love about being a Developer Advocate is attending and speaking at conferences. I loved that as a developer – in fact, I first met (now, fellow-) Camunda Developer Advocate Niall Deehan at the Camunda booth when speaking at NDC Oslo, in 2017. A essential part of the conference experience is getting some cool swag. My wardrobe is literally 70% conference and swag t-shirts. But as a Developer Advocate, I get to be one of the people handing out cool swag (as well as still snagging some cool stuff while I’m there). The recent move to online events has changed the world – creating some constraints, but also opening some novel possibilities: No more travelling...

Falko Menge, one of our Camunda Consultants, has released a performance benchmarking/tuning tool that he has been using for the past year with Camunda customers to tune Zeebe for their production workloads. It is a spreadsheet template for creating and recording performance tests, and observing the effects of the various parameters on performance. We did a live stream explaining how it works, which you can view here. The spreadsheet itself is available here. You can make a copy of the spreadsheet and use it for your own testing. If you want to watch a longer explanation of the parameters, we did a more detailed stream on it a month ago, which you can watch here. If you want to provide...

True story: A recruiter quits his job, contributes to open source, gets a job as a software engineer.

Hacktoberfest is coming! And Camunda is participating, with the opportunity to get a sweet limited-edition Camunda Hacktoberfest t-shirt by making just two pull requests to any of our open source projects. We’ve also put together a guide for open source repository maintainers, to empower you to create an extraordinary contributor experience. Creating an Extraordinary Contributor Experience This document is for open source project maintainers who want to increase community contributions to their project. We’ll look at the Contributor Experience and how you can create an Extraordinary Contributor Experience. So You’re a Maintainer You’re an open source project maintainer. You’re probably also a contributor to the project – maybe the only one. Wouldn’t it be great to have other people making...

In the latest episode of the Zeebe Nation podcast, Pierre-Louis Gottfrois introduces his new library – a Ruby on Rails client for Zeebe called Beez. Check out the episode here. And take a look at the Beez project on GitHub.

Zeebe supports FEEL v1.11 – the “Friendly Enough Expression Language” – to express dynamic behaviour in your processes. You can use FEEL expressions in a number of places in your BPMN models. From the Zeebe documentation: The following attributes of BPMN elements require an expression: Sequence Flow on an Exclusive Gateway: condition Message Catch Event / Receive Task: correlation key Multi-Instance Activity: input collection, output element Input/Output Variable Mappings: source Additionally, the following attributes of BPMN elements can define an expression optionally instead of a static value: Timer Catch Event: timer definition Message Catch Event / Receive Task: message name Service Task: job type, job retries Call Activity: process id Gateway The most obvious place that you use an expression...