Life at Paperless Post

Different Methods for Merging Ruby Hashes

Today, a co-worker was reviewing some code of mine similar to this:

foo({a: 1}.merge(b: 2))

He suggested that using merge! would be faster, as it would save instantiating a new hash. I was skeptical but…

How We Added Time Travel to Paperless Post

Our designers make our cards beautiful, but our users make them unique. To help them, we’ve built a card editing tool that allows extensive customization. And customize they do: over and over, we’ve seen our users stretch the limits of the design system…

Paperless Post: Now With Machine Learning!

Our interface designers came up with several registration form views, but didn’t know which view would perform the best and wanted to compare them in the field. A/B testing with Google Website Optimizer was kicked around as a solution, but I stumbled…

VDAY 13: A Post Mortem

Paperless Post does business year round, but we are a company whose traffic and usage patterns are driven by holidays and seasons. This past week included Valentine’s Day, which historically is one of our busiest days of the year. The interesting thing about Valentine’s Day for us…

Redis Tips: Persistence-Only Slaves and the Slowlog

At Paperless Post we rely on a lot of different Open Source software, from the Nginx web server that serves our traffic, to the PostgreSQL RDBMS that we use to keep our data safe and secure. One of the more interesting is Redis: the…

The Data You Need

There are lots of people at Paperless Post who need data, and over time we have been consistently improving how we get it to them. This is an article about a simple gem we built, ReplicaConnect, that allows easy access to our data inside simple ruby scripts.

Homepage video

To celebrate our brand’s promise of connecting loved ones, we created a short film for our homepage that showcases a range of active events that all started with an invitation.

The active event

Setting Up Elasticsearch Synonyms

Here at Paperless Post, we’re in the process of upgrading our search engine from Thinking Sphinx to Elasticsearch to provide better and faster search results to our users — more on this in a future blog post! As a result, we wanted to take some time to explore the…