June 2019 Summaries

Managing Postmark templates with Github using Travis CI or CircleCI involves storing your email templates in version control and automating their deployment to Postmark. To do this, you need to set up a Github repository for your templates, pull them from Postmark using the CLI tool, and then use a CI/CD tool like Travis CI or CircleCI to automatically push the templates to Postmark whenever you make changes to the master branch. The process involves installing the Postmark CLI tool, setting up environment variables for authentication, and creating a config file in your project root that specifies how to handle the deployment. Once set up, you can use a bash script to push your templates locally or integrate with deployment platforms like DeployBot or Buddy. It's also important to note that once your templates are stored in Github, it's recommended to avoid making changes in the Postmark web editor to prevent version conflicts.

Postmark is releasing a new feature called Layouts, which allows users to define common elements like CSS, headers, and footers, and reuse them across multiple Templates. This feature aims to simplify the process of managing templates by extracting common elements and making it easy to apply those changes across all templates. The feature was developed after extensive research and validation with customers, who preferred a more elegant solution over Partials, which is a commonly used approach in email providers. With this release, users can now create new Layouts independently or as part of creating a new Template, and the feature will be supported by various Postmark tools and libraries, including the API, CLI tool, and MailMason. The company encourages feedback from users to further improve the feature.

Postmark, a cloud-based email service provider, occasionally sends webhooks to applications multiple times due to various issues in the distributed system. To handle this, Postmark makes a best effort for "at least once delivery," retrying webhooks over several hours before marking them as failures. This approach is chosen over "exactly once delivery" or "fake it," which would introduce additional complexity and potential issues. Idempotency is key to dealing with duplicate webhooks; it ensures that the system remains in the same state after receiving the same input multiple times, regardless of how many times it's applied. By making inputs uniquely identifiable and using techniques like inserting identities into a secondary table during transactions, applications can achieve idempotent qualities, enhancing their resilience in the face of failure and improving scalability.

We're using productboard to improve our product planning process by consolidating all customer insights in a centralized inbox, prioritizing features based on customer needs and business value, sharing our roadmap with the team, and validating ideas through a portal. This has significantly improved my comfort level with having a handle on everything we're working on, what we need to plan for, and what customers want, compared to using non-specific tools. The tool's flexibility and customization options have been key in tailoring it to our specific needs, making it easy for the broader team to see benefits without needing to do much. Overall, productboard has added significant value to our product and workflow, and I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a product planning tool.