What Are Web APIs Used For?
Brandon West
Technical
A web API allows two programs to speak to each other by standardizing the language and making it easy for you to get what you need from a program. Read More ›
Technical
Brandon West
Technical
Scaling Product Management at SendGrid: Building a Developer Experience Team
Scott Williamson
Company, Product, Technical
To focus more on developer experience (DX), we created a team that wakes up every day thinking about how to improve the SendGrid experience for developers. Read More ›
Yanking the Andon Cord
Brad Culberson
Technical
When a teammate discovers a potential issue that may affect customers or team efficiency we raise that awareness immediately. We pull the Andon Cord. Read More ›
Blueprints at SendGrid
Sean Kilgore
Best Practices, Technical
Product and Engineering teams at SendGrid use Blueprints to minimize drift in our projects and to ensure that we’re delivering what customers want. Read More ›
DBAs, A Priesthood No More
Silvia Botros
Technical
Read about the modern Data Base Administrator (DBA) and how the role can fit in with the operations team of any organization. Read More ›
How to Celebrate Paid Off Tech Debt
Tim Jenkins
Company, Technical
Tech debt seems to be pretty popular topic. In my experience, there are two types of startups: those who are successful and have tech debt, and those who are not successful. The good news is that if a company is successful, there is the chance to get rid of the old tech debt, and in many of those cases it is a great cause for celebration among the engineers who have had to deal with it. Read More ›
Scaling Riak and Solr for Marketing Campaigns
Brad Culberson
Technical
When you get deep into the details, sometimes you miss the easiest solution–one you already know and are capable of because you have already done it once. Last year, we were battling some major scaling issues in Riak search which is based on Solr. Find out how we solved this problem. Read More ›
SendGrid 💖s Developers
Lindsey Weinig
Product, Technical
Over the last few months we worked closely with our community to develop, and now release, new interactive v3 API documentation, a streamlined set-up flow to expedite integration, and a new C# library supporting .NET Standard 1.3.
Read More ›
How to Back Up Riak and Solr Data
Brad Culberson
Technical
SendGrid is using Riak and Solr for the Marketing Campaigns contacts dataset. We built a disaster recovery plan that protects that dataset from corruption/unintentional deletion/data center loss. This is a challenging task due to the size and growth of that data. We’re currently storing approximately 2TB of key value data and 18TB of Solr index data. Read More ›
Caching Is Not Like Bacon: Control Yourself
Brad Culberson
Technical
Most developers think caching is like bacon. You can add it to anything and it’s better. Brad Culberson, Principal Engineer II at SendGrid shares how he runs across code in production that is frequently overly complex and actually performing worse due to caching. This article will guide you on what to look for and how you should evaluate whether your cache is detrimental to your application. Read More ›
What is an API?
Brandon West
Technical
Still unclear about the definition of an Application Programming Interface? Read about what an API is, and how it compares to items we use every day. Read More ›
Creating a Subscription Widget with Node.js
Devin Chasanoff
Best Practices, Technical
I recently developed an open source subscription widget built using SendGrid’s Node.js API library. While this is not an officially supported SendGrid library, the goal was to make an easily deployable, flexible widget any SendGrid customer can incorporate into an HTML page that collects existing and potential customers’ email addresses and other useful information to store within their Marketing Campaigns Contacts. Read More ›