Lena Vu Sawyer
As a Global DevOps Engineer at Zinus, Mason (Junkuk) Kim’s role is to build software to enable the marketing, business, and customer service teams to deliver their customers the highest quality support experience.
Often, the required turnaround time for these projects is extremely short, and Mason will need to have a solution ready within days or even hours. Even more, the teams he is supporting are based in numerous countries around the globe. The speed at which Mason’s team can build and deploy a working web service on Replit is the primary reason he chose the platform.
Zinus uses Shopify to host its e-commerce site, which they extend using an external front-end development platform. However, Mason’s team was recently tasked with switching off of their old front-end development platform and finding a new one. Their old platform caused excessively long response times to service requests from Zinus, which harmed their business. Mason had to redevelop the older web pages on the new platform in just a few weeks to ensure a smoother support process.
“At that moment, no other platform but Replit came to mind, and I had limited time to complete the development. In our situation, Replit was the best choice.”
Mason and his teammates began collaboratively building support tools on Replit. The first tools Mason built were forms to facilitate easier contact with the Zinus support team via email. The majority of customer inquiries at Zinus are received via email, and while other tools didn’t integrate effectively with the customer success platform, with Replit, Mason could configure the forms to seamlessly fit into their workflows. After implementing and impressing his team with the first few tools he built, Mason started to get more requests from other departments and colleagues around the globe.
“I’m really proud I’ve deployed form pages with Replit globally. You can see the UK, Italy, German, Spain, and French sites here. All of the global sites are using Replit now!”
As an experienced developer, Mason has no problem coding quickly, but he still encounters frustrating workflows that slow him down. One of the biggest obstacles for Mason has been the time it takes to configure and deploy his web services on most other platforms.
“Coding these days is easy and I can build a website really quickly with some libraries and with AI. But the part I'm spending the most of my time on is hosting: designing the infrastructure, building the databases, integrating those infrastructures together, and configuring all the setup for the web service to make it available to outside clients. This part is made way easier with Replit.”
By using Replit’s Reserved VM Deployments, Mason could efficiently deploy new web services without sacrificing quality or reliability. Replit’s deployment options were easy to understand and implement and gave him the insight into hardware performance details he needed to feel confident.
As he continues to build, Mason wants to expand his team’s use of Replit and adopt it for more advanced core engineering functions. He’s looking forward to testing out the new features Replit is developing.
