Earlier this week I had the good fortune of being reminded of Stamplay. Stamplay is a browser-based web application creator that allows the user to skip backend coding. By connecting multiple components, assigning actions to those components, then coding-up the frontend in any way you want. It’s pretty amazing how quickly you can throw together fully (and I stress fully) functioning applications without manually hooking up a bunch of APIs and writing a ton of backend code. I wanted to take this opportunity to build a super-quick User Feedback app, that although is very simple, would have taken a lot longer…
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Despite predictions of its impending doom, email is here to stay. Not only are companies expanding their transactional email programs to further engage their users, but 61% plan to increase their marketing email spend in 2015. There is a lot of incredible new technology giving you more control over your email marketing than ever before. But is it worth it to pay a premium to have access to all these features, or is it better to go for a no-frills solution to stretch your budget as far as it can go? In my experience, most companies don’t have time to utilize…
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Back in November, I had the pleasure of speaking at How To Web in Bucharest, Romania about a subject very close to my heart – hackathons. More specifically, how product teams can use hackathons, both the environment and the hacker mentality, to drive their products forward in a way that is both engaging and creatively flexible for developers. The main talk will be online on the How To Web YouTube channel shortly, but here are some of the key points I made: Have Restriction-Free Time Part of the draw of many hackathons is the freedom to experiment in a no-pressure…
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If you’ve spent any amount of time sending email for either personal or professional reasons, you’ve probably encountered a very common and very frustrating problem: understanding email server response codes. When you send an email that fails to get accepted, the response codes sent back by ISPs like Yahoo, Gmail, and even home-brewed Mail Transfer Agents (MTAs) can be unhelpful, bizarre, and sometimes downright confusing. Here are a few examples of what I mean: 550 5.7.1 RESOLVER.RST.NotAuthorized; not authorized Huh? What’s not authorized? Who? Where? 554 Reject by behaviour spam Who is this “behavior spam” and why is he rejecting…
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My New Year’s resolution is to show the email world a better way to manage their recipient engagement. The main focus of my engagement argument is around re-engagement campaigns. These campaigns are traditionally sent to subscribers who do not engage with your email—those you want to “win-back” to being engaged with your product or service. Re-engagement Emails are Broken But, the data tells us that re-engagement campaigns are a broken concept. In fact, we have data that shows reengagement campaigns can send an otherwise good sender directly to the spam folder. Re-engagement campaigns target only the least engaged recipients and then…
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In my final Code Challenge blog post, I’m taking a look at CrunchBase. If you’d like to read more about this Code Challenge, and see a list of other posts, visit my first post: 15 Days of Code Challenge. In my previous blog posts we looked at a Python module and Machine Learning API that let us analyze incoming email by their sentiment and concepts based on the body of the email. In this post, I want to showcase another way to classify and prioritize your incoming email. We’ll look at the CrunchBase API and get information from their database on the sender and their…
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Last year I talked about SendGrid’s decision to use Go as our primary development language. For the most part this has affected only new services. Recently though, we have completed a rewrite of one of our highest load components to Go and I thought I would share the story and some of the lessons learned. Background As some background, almost a year ago one of our engineers who was helping to make the pitch of why we should use Go rewrote the service that handles final customer IP selection/transmission of data to remote SMTP servers as a proof of concept/example…
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