Eugene Fedorenko is Writing, Reading, and Traveling
Published at Beanstalk
We’re really excited to announce a new navigation in Beanstalk. It solves a few problems, provides a bunch of improvements and introduces several new features. We’ve been working on it for a while and think it creates a great foundation for our upcoming features.
Published at Postmark
It’s not unusual to have a flashback to the Netscape Navigator 4 and Internet Explorer 5 days when working on an HTML email. The quality of rendering engines is totally inconsistent, most modern development techniques are unavailable, and even images – an essential element of many emails – are turned off by default in many clients. This can feel like 1998, but the web development community has learned a lot since then. Strategies like progressive enhancement and modern tools like Litmus can help us build HTML emails suited for today’s Babylon of inconsistent desktop clients, various web clients, tablets, smartphones, and high resolution displays.
Published at Wildbit
Recently while redesigning one of Beanstalk’s pages I had an interesting problem to solve. I had a few blocks which I wanted to highlight as a result of user’s action.
Published at Postmark
At Postmark, our goal is to be an extension of your infrastructure – you set it up once and then forget about it. This can cause problems though – while we’re sending your emails with no issues, you aren’t really keeping an eye on problems (like bounces, spam, etc). Yesterday we launched a new major feature which will help you keep track of your servers’ activity without needing to login – weekly digests.
Published at Wildbit
Beanstalk is a mature product and during its’ 5 years of existence the design and UI have been changed a lot. Our CSS grows accordingly and lately it consisted of 5 files, 14,211 lines and 290 KB of code. We handcrafted our CSS from the start but more recently it had become quite hard to manage. With the growth of new tools like Sass and LESS I decided to rebuild our stylesheets into something cleaner and easier to maintain, and after working with the new system for a month I’m really happy with the results.
Published at Wildbit
Since the early days of Beanstalk we have been using our Twitter account for status updates and maintenance notices, but it became obvious that a separate status page was needed for better communication. Twitter is a great way to learn about problems or maintenance, but only for people who check it all the time. People who are not on Twitter or don’t follow us have to check our Twitter stream which can be cluttered with replies or retweets and not clearly display the current status of our services.
Published at Wildbit
A month ago, Wildbit released a mobile-optimized view of Beanstalk which is very handy for code-collaboration on the go. While researching for this project, I was surprised to find that mobile usage is slowly passing usage of IE 6-8 at Beanstalk. It’s like a dream come true!
Published at Beanstalk
For our last retreat in Spain we were asked to come up with “secret projects”. As a designer I had a hard time coming up with a feature that wouldn’t require any help from developers, but once I tried to check some commits on my iPhone I realized that viewing Beanstalk on a mobile device was exactly the thing I wanted to make better.
Published at Beanstalk
This week we launched a pretty cool feature – daily digest emails with a summary of activity in each repository. This is a great way to stay on track without drowning in commit notification emails. It shows not only a list of commits but also Git pushes, manual deployments, branch merges and removals. In Git repositories you will even get summary of changes for every commit, something like git log --stat produces – number of changed files and added or removed lines of code.
Published at Beanstalk
Until today our Keys section was just one big input field where users pasted as many keys and they needed. This solution was simple, but it didn’t work well for developers with multiple computers — error validation was confusing and it wasn’t clear how to separate keys or which key belongs to which computer. So we decided to redesign this section.