Engineering
If you are looking to start hosting your own Mastodon server (or already started hosting one!) then you may have come across the need for an email provider or SMTP server. In fact, Mastodon’s getting started documentation lists an email provider as a required service that you should have in place before beginning the process of running your own Mastodon server. Many “one-click” Mastodon installers such as Digital Ocean’s will even prompt you for SMTP server credentials during the setup process. Why use an email service provider with Mastodon? Email plays a crucial role when running a Mastodon instance. For example, users will receive their signup confirmations or password reset links via email—and you need an SMTP server, because if those messages don’t make it to the inbox, your users will be stuck! We don’t want that to happen. And folks will want to know about new followers, too! You’ll
ActiveCampaign Quarterly Hackathon Each quarter at ActiveCampaign the Tech and Product teams host a company-wide hackathon. It is an opportunity for everyone to take a small time to focus on a project, pet-peeve, or proof of concept they have been thinking about. As this is a highly collaborative event, non-engineers are encouraged to participate as well. The event takes place over three days, the first two being “hack days” with presentations on the final day. Several hackathon projects have even made it to production! For this quarter’s hackathon the unofficial theme was AI. Although it was not required, “bonus points” were awarded for incorporating AI into projects developed for this hackathon. This theme led to several creative project ideas including a data science playground, a proof of concept for a self-hosted AI chat-bot, improved asynchronous automation, improved code searching, and many more. The ActiveCampaign developer relations team also participated in the hackathon
It’s been fascinating to see Postmark grow over the past years. Today, we’re processing more emails and support more customers than ever before. Just last month, we saw email volume increase by 24%. Sure, these numbers are exciting, but you know what we’re even more proud of? While we continue to grow, we’re still delivering email faster and more reliably than our competition. And our customers love Postmark just as much as they did a few years ago. We never want that to change. But we also have to be realistic about the capabilities of our current setup: If Postmark continues to grow at the rate we’re seeing today, we’ll hit our capacity limits at some point—and if that ever happened, the user experience would suffer. So it’s time to get ahead of that growth. Let’s give Postmark some bigger pipes! The Mail Flow When our users want to send email,…
Last year, Postmark celebrated its tenth anniversary. In 2010, Postmark was built using the best tools and methodologies available, but over the years, it had accumulated many responsibilities that weren’t anticipated when launched. Additionally, as many readers will remember, the landscape and methods for building software substantially evolved over those 10 years: Async web frameworks were in their infancy.Docker didn’t exist.jQuery was the de facto way to build interactive web apps.12 Factor App hadn’t been presented.“Infrastructure as code” didn’t exist.“Serverless” hadn’t been coined. Today, I’d like to share some details about one of the largest projects our team has ever embarked on—moving from our colocated data center to AWS—with some of the lessons we learned on this journey and tools we used to be successful. Part I: The journey begins Make the next right decision As with most early-stage apps, you have to make trade-offs to validate the product quickly,…