Mailstache | Disposable Email Service

When I neared completion of MailStache, I knew starting a blog would be crucial for gaining some traction. By creating a blog, I can build up content around my service which would help search engines find me. There are a ton of blogging platforms out there, but when it came to choosing one for MailStache I narrowed it down to Wordpress and Tumblr.

Pros and cons of Wordpress I've done my fair share of WP development over the years, so I'm pretty comfortable with the platform. It has a huge user base, tons of plugins, and is very easy to make SEO friendly.

Wordpress has a lot going for it, but for this blog there were two things that prevented me from using it. I wanted to focus all my development efforts on MailStache and not WP. Although hosting a WP site is fairly easy you still have to install and configure Apache, PHP, MySQL, install updates and manage plugins. I've done all of this plenty of times, but you would be surprised how time consuming "small updates" can be.

My second issue with WP is PHP. Now don't get me wrong, I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with PHP, I spent my first 8 years as a developer using PHP. But over the past year or so I've been introduced to Ruby on Rails, and most recently Node, which is what MailStache is built on. After being exposed to RoR and Node, I kind of consider PHP to be that ex you're still friendly with but don't really talk to anymore (pardon me for mixing frameworks and languages).

Pros and cons of Tumblr My experience with Tumblr before starting this blog was very minimal. I wrote a couple small posts a while back, and played around with customizing themes but that's about it. My biggest attraction to Tumblr is its ecosystem. It seems to me that finding bloggers of similar interest, and getting them to find you is much easier than a stand alone blog. This hypothesis was proven true when I actually got several likes and reblogs on my first to posts. Even though the interactions were small, it's still pretty damn exciting! Getting a reblog is a double score in my book, not only does your post get exposed to that person's audience, but it adds to your backlinks for SEO.

Although you can edit Tumblr's templates, you lack the ability to add plugins and customize the server side code like you can with WP. This could come back to bite me in the ass later down the road, but for now I'm fine with leaving the blog as is.

There's no question about it, the tech field is one of the fastest growing industries in the world. As the internet matures, so do the frameworks, languages, and technologies it's built on. As I prepared MailStache for launch, I took a step back to think about how web development has changed over the past 10 years.

Web Development in 2003 I was a sophomore in high school taking my first web development course and was instantly hooked. I was taught the most basic HTML and CSS, which assisted me in navigating Dreamweaver. I couldn't tell you the difference between DHTML and Javascript, but lets be real, who really cared when you could program in Flash. IE6 was the defacto standard browser which taught me to believe PNGs were bad because they always had blue backgrounds. Chrome wouldn't come out for years, and Firefox was something I wouldn't learn about for another couple years.

After building a few static web sites I taught myself how to make data driven sites using PHP and MySQL, this was a game changer. I was able to run MySQL queries from PHP, in the same file that was rendering my HTML. Mind = Blown.

For the next several years HTML, CSS, MySQL and PHP would be my full development stack.

Web Development in 2013 It's amazing to think, even with how much things have changed the web is still ruled by HTML, CSS and Javascript. IMO the advancement in the web has come from two sources, browsers and open source software.

Life is about choices, and we now choose not to use Internet Explorer (we are making that choice, right?). Firefox, Chrome, Safari and even Opera are providing developers new features we could only dream of years ago. Combine this with the creative minds around the world and our possibilities are endless. We're at a time where the question isn't, "Can it be built?", but, "Should it be bult?". Whether it's geolocation, AJAX, or responsive design, browsers have come a long way.

Does anyone know who came up with the idea of open source software? I owe him a beer ... or 10. The fact that I can "steal" someone else's code, modify it, and use it in my own project without getting in trouble is simply amazing. OSS like jQuery, Rails, Linux, Webkit, Bootstrap, and LESS don't just make a developers life easier, but provides excellent source code for us to dissect and learn from. It's one thing to read a book, or tutorial about Javascript, but digging through jQuery's source will give you a much better idea of real world implementation.

While my dev stack from 10 years ago is still used today, my usage of these languages has evolved and I've added some tools along the way. From beginning to end here's a full list of the languages, software, and programing paradigms used for MailStache.

Yeoman - Scaffolding

Grunt - Task Runner

Require.js - Javascript dependency management

Backbone - Client side framework

Jade - HTML templating

LESS - CSS preprocessor

Git - Source control management

Node.js - Server side javascript

Express.js - Web framework for Node

Haraka - Node email server

REST

MVC