Wildbit

Creating a ticket in the task management system is easy. But frequently, you probably run into the situation where your tickets get “noisy” and become unreadable.
Why does this happen? Well, when many people are involved in a specific ticket, there will be bunch of assigning, back and forth communication, until the ticket is approved, [...]

Ever since we started working on Postmark we decided we would have a cool REST API that uses simple JSON as transport. Being mostly web developers ourselves, we wanted to help people break away from the SMTP tyranny. As most people around, we hated SMTP — it’s an ancient protocol and its age shows… [...]

Last week we launched our new bounces UI for Postmark. We significantly cleaned up the delivery issues page trying to both give you a better tool for visualizing bounces and spam complaints and introduce our new features: tags, bounce dumps, inactive bounces. We are proud with the user interface, but having a UI is not always the best thing you can do. What if you had in mind a different way to visualize delivery issues? What if you want to tightly integrate your application with Postmark and fetch and display bounces directly in your dashboard instead of requiring users to use the Postmark UI? Now you can do that!

I was excited and eager to try HTML5 in a real project for a long time, so when Gilbert redesigned the Beanstalk landing site I was fully armed for coding it. The web doesn’t need one more HTML5 overview, so this post will focus on 5 things I liked the most during the project.

Phew, that was a busy several weeks. We have been hard at work improving the way we handle bounces on Postmark. The newest additions to our service are support for tagging emails and disabling delivery to addresses that do not want your email.
Tagging
How many times have you wanted to tag your outgoing email and check [...]

Wait, Github? That’s right, we use Github. While some people think that Github is a competitor, we feel our goals and mission are quite different. Beanstalk, which is now offering Git support, is fully focused on private team collaboration around version control. Github, on the other hand, has taken social coding to an entirely new level, using Git as an excellent technical solution to the problem. We use Github for this exact reason, opening up our code to a large community to help others and improve the tools.

You might have noticed by now, but we gave Beanstalk’s landing site a new, fresh look. While we were always very happy with the identity itself (logotype, colors, etc.), the landing site got cluttered over time because we added several elements (like customer logos) which weren’t really planned right from the beginning.

You might have been one of the “lucky” few that tried to pass a comma separated list of email in the To field of a Postmark message just to get back the “Multiple recipients not supported” error. Or maybe you are one of the guys that have been wondering “How come they don’t support Cc?” [...]

After Ilya presenting pretty-diff gem, this Friday it is my turn to share another gem we chose to extract from Beanstalk.

Shellshot – Deal With System Commands the Right Way

First of all, let me warn you. Issuing system calls is usually the worst way to deal with a certain problem. Executable locations vary from platform to platform. Eventual errors are hard to track. Stuck processes are hard to kill. Parameters should be escaped properly. Chances are someone from the community implemented what you need as a gem. If you really need the performance, drop to C even.

We have been using Hoptoad for our email delivery service , Postmark, and have been extremely happy with it. We are able to get all sorts of feedback on how our app is doing, often being able to fix an issue before a customer actually reports it. At first glance Hoptoad looks [...]

Since we launched Postmark, we’ve been using it for Beanstalk to send our transactional emails. This includes welcome emails, invites, and most notably commit email notifications. I had a look at the volume for January and thought it was interesting.

We’re really excited to have our first round of beta testers using Postmark today. We built Postmark to deliver emails for you, and that is what it will do. On top of email delivery, we are going to provide features to help web apps get the best results from their transactional mail. I wanted to [...]

Since we have moved from Basecamp for task tracking to Lighthouse our workflow has changed significantly. Our workflow improved not just because of using a new task tracking system, but also due to learning from mistakes and figuring out what works best for us. It’s something that did not happen over night. We have made numerous small improvements over time and achieved much better productivity. This article is a small insight in the practices we use.

Our company is all about cool practices of how to make our workflow better and our products stunning. We strive toward a rock solid development workflow, with things like continues integration and dedicated QA staff. We also post release notes weekly for every project to share the insight between team members. We do scrum meetings daily. But we always strive for more…

The Wildbit team recently returned from our 2009 retreat. We try to make it an annual event, as our last retreat was in October of ‘08 in Turkey. This year, we headed off to the mountain resort town of Bansko, Bulgaria. Every time we have a retreat it is more about hanging out than working, but we’re always sure to set goals and spend some time actually working in a room together. For you, our customers, we have a lot planned for 2010, but first let’s take a look back at 2009.