Development

Similar to most web applications that don't have millions of users, our simple server architecture sufficed for the first couple years of our company. Two front-end servers (EC2 instances), one load balancer, and one database server (RDS instance). Apart from the occasional press hit where we...

As soon as your website amasses a sizable amount of users - probably somewhere around 50,000 or so - you're going to require two different types of emailing services. One for mass email (emails sent to your entire user base) and one for transaction email (emails sent to individual users after an...

SEO has amassed a bad reputation over the years. Is it legit? Is it snake oil? The truth lies somewhere in the middle. SEO can improve the quantity and quality of organic traffic you receive, but it's not magic. The SEO 'specialists' who suggest building link farms, low-value landing pages, and...

We upgraded the thredUP app from Rails 3.0 to Rails 3.1 this past week. On the day we deployed the upgrade, our test suite was green and everything looked solid locally and on our staging server, but out of sheer paranoia I decided to take one of our front-end servers off of the load balancer and...

In the past year, the post 2.0 web design era has really come into its own. I wrote about the start of this when web designers first started to embrace HTML5 and what it has to offer, but the time has finally come when over-the-top Flash websites, such as this one, are no longer the standard for...

If you're a web developer and you have spent time writing JavaScript and/or styling with CSS, odds are you're familiar with Chrome Developer Tools (CDT). When I discovered CDT, my front-end productivity sky-rocketed. Editing CSS on the fly, inspecting HTML, and interacting/debugging with the...

Being inspired is one of the strongest types of motivation for me. When I see something great, I can become inspired to build something of equal caliber or at least put more effort into what I'm currently working on. Sometimes the execution of an idea can be just as inspiring as the idea itself....

One of the biggest advantages to using Ruby on Rails as your web framework is the open source community. They unselfishly release new gems every day. They build the best tutorials for free and they commit to the latest Rails builds on a daily basis. The only variable left in the equation when...

thredUP has been using Basecamp as our project management tool since before I started in September of 2010. We're an agile development team and it's important for us to have a collaboration tool to manage our user stories as well as organize our projects/sprints. Our sprints are two weeks long....

After spending the last 6 hours catching up on Build & Analyze podcasts (one of the few podcasts that I never miss an episode of), I'm compelled to write down some thoughts on the development philosophies that were discussed.

I listen to the show for one reason: when Marco talks about...

That title was a mouthful! This post is a simple bug fix for an IE 7/8 issue that I couldn't find any solution for on the interwebs. The bug is as follows: if you use the Facebook JavaScript SDK to send apprequests (the invites that show up in the Facebook notifications jewel) and you're doing so...

Rails is one of those languages where you can infer how it should interpret code. A more simple way to word that is this: sometimes you'll be coding something for the hundredth time and all of a sudden you'll think to yourself 'I wonder if this will work' and you'll try to change a convention...