Recently, I had the chance to teach kids how to launch rockets using Arduinos. As you might guess, it was a blast. We wrote a countdown program using Node.js, hooked the program up to an Arduino, and wired up the Arduino. This sent an electrical signal to the rocket engine, igniting it. In this tutorial, I show you how to do the same. Prerequisites You will need the following materials: Arduino Mega 2560 Board. You could use a different Arduino board, but I recommend the Mega. NodeJS installed on your computer. It is relatively easy to install. You can go…
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Dear Gmail Team, Gmail will be 10 years old next month. Congrats! I love the innovations you’ve made over the past decade. Thanks to you, my email is more useful and accessible than it ever was. I’m delighted by the Gmail feedback loop, one of those behind the scenes innovations that regular users won’t notice. Since I am responsible for keeping SendGrid’s email stream clean, I am especially grateful for the helpful data that’s now available to trustworthy email service providers. SendGrid’s anti-spam team has been making effective use of the spam feedback you share. It identifies spammers that other…
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I love technical blog posts, especially those that can take you through the entire process of building an app, A to Z. After reading thousands of technical blog posts and writing many myself, I’ve decided that it’s time to share a workflow that I hope will help those who are creating amazing things to blog more easily and often. The specific tools utilized in this workflow are Mac OSX based, but the concepts can be applied to any toolchain. Check out AlternativeTo.net to find similar apps for your OS. Use the Natural Planning Method When I write a technical blog…
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Maintaining your subscriber list is an essential part of any email marketing strategy because it allows you to trim away addresses in your list who don’t wish to receive your messages. Continuing to send to these messages can leave you open to being reported as spam, which can hurt your reputation and deliverability. SendGrid provides customers with two different ways to manage their marketing email subscribers: Email Reports – By enabling the Subscription Tracking App from the “Apps” section of your account, a footer will be placed at the bottom of all transactional SMTP and Web API emails. This footer…
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While your email program is humming along, spammers are still hard at work trying to devise ways to send malicious messages to your customers. Mobile is now the new frontier for these elusive thieves, allowing them to be even more creative in their approach, and according to Cloudmark’s 2013 Global Messaging Threat Report, they are making good progress. It’s important to stay on top of trends with spammers in all channels, so we’ve provided some highlights of the report here: Phishing tops the list. In 2013, phishing accounted for 20% of SMS spam in the U.S. with 67% of those SMS…
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Don’t tell developers what to build–simple advice that should be central to all hackathons. However, it’s all too frequently ignored by hackathon organizers. Hackathons are a time for developers to learn new technology, meet new people, and pick up new skills. As a rule, it’s better for open exploration to have an unstructured environment rather than a highly regulated one. However, organizers often make the mistake of thinking that rules and structure will create a better event that better conforms to their preferred outcome. A developer’s job is to solve problems and get around obstacles. When an organizer tells a…
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It’s nice to spice up your transactional emails with a few images from time to time. Even if it’s just a logo, you’ll find it helps to add a touch of legitimacy to what you’re sending out. However, there’s no one way to do this. Do you link out to the image on a CDN? Do you embed it and reference it via a CID tag? Maybe as a linked image? Which one should you choose? In this post, we’ll look at the options available and address a few pros and cons of using them, as well as how you…
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