Writing (sometimes)

Earlier this year, our design team spent a few weeks analyzing and improving the performance of the Postmark product website. Our app is known for lightning-fast email delivery, and we wanted to provide a similar experience to the visitors of the website. Conveniently, what’s good for people is also good for robots — search engines increasingly use performance and user experience metrics as a ranking factor in search results. Once completed, this project made the Postmark site significantly faster and increased our Lighthouse Performance score from 68 to a perfect 100.

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While working with Figma, I discovered a powerful way to lay out objects using a combination of Layout Grid and Constraints. The interface of Figma does not indicate a connection between the two, so it can be discovered either by a happy accident or from reading a help article. Luckily, the latter is my kind of fun pastime.

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A few weeks ago on our annual Wildbit retreat we had a group discussion on what works and what doesn’t in our internal process. A few developers mentioned the same problem — a lack of shoptalk with their peers when working remotely. They came up with different solutions, from participating in local meetups to weekly lunches with other developers, but it reminded me of a time when the same problem was very acute in our design team.

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A little over a year ago, we had 4 marketing websites built with 4 different frameworks or CMSs, and it was a mess. As the team had grown, publishing became a nightmare — nobody really knew how to access or update any specific page or a part of a website. We had some work to do. Within a few months we researched, picked, and migrated to a single CMS; moved marketing websites to a single hosting platform from multiple scattered services; and created a library of modules that is reused on all of them. This massive project isn’t completely over yet, but enough time passed both to confirm that we made a right choice and to see some of its issues.

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While working on a new Wildbit website last week I spent some time tweaking its performance. Caching CSS, JS, and images for a long period of time is one of the most important things you can do to create a fast loading website. It’s relatively easy to configure on most web servers, but comes with a downside — you’ll need to invalidate cached files whenever they change.

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Today we’re happy to introduce an enhanced and more useful dashboard. Our team uses Beanstalk every day and we felt like the current version needed some love and some key features. And you — our customers — told us the same thing.

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This guide explains how to launch a website powered by Craft CMS with a proper development environment and workflow behind it. You’ll set up a local development environment, put Craft theme and config files under version control with Git, create and configure a new DigitalOcean droplet, install Craft on it, and then deploy your theme and configs to a live website with DeployBot.

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This guide explains how to compile website assets with Build Tools during deployment. We’ll use Grunt as an example, but everything below can be applied to Gulp or any other Node-based task runner as well.

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