Notes From the Engineering Team — June 24, 2016

We on the engineering team have been hard at work this week and are really excited about one big announcement:

We’ve overhauled and streamlined the creation of broadcasts from your RSS feeds!

We’re really happy to put this in your hands. Along with the new interface, we have two much-requested features we’re releasing with it today: previewing your rss broadcasts and the ability to send them automatically. I’ve recorded a quick GIF for you to see it in action:

Check it out over on the Automations tab in your account!

We’ve also been pouring a lot of time and energy into making your broadcasts send faster. Over the past 30 days, you’ve sent an average of 671 broadcasts to 2.7 million people every day! That’s impressive! We love it and we love helping you get your content out to all your subscribers right when you need to. This sprint, we’ve been at work on some upgrades to keep making that possible:

• Upgrading our worker bees that send your messages (we use Sidekiq for background processes, for those who are interested).
  With this, we’ve seen a significant reduction in up-front processing time for broadcasts.
• Revamping how we update message statuses (delivered, bounced, etc).
  Updating message statuses were using the same worker bees that send out the broadcast emails. We’ve moved that process elsewhere to give more space to send.
• Increasing the number of queues available to send.
  We tweak this one from time to time, but with our other improvements, we were able to bump up the available broadcast queues. This means more of you can hit “send” all at once and still see the same delivery speed.

We’ve got more work yet to make the broadcasts send out even faster, but we’re really happy with how far we’ve come this week!

Beyond that, we spent some time this sprint upgrading some other parts of our infrastructure to increase the reliability of the app day-to-day. We’re so excited at how fast we’re growing and we dig solving the puzzles introduced by continuing to scale up.

Last but definitely not least, we did a couple of small tweaks to landing pages and forms: a much clearer way to access the edit screen of a sliding landing page, and some nice cleanup to the embed section of the form edit page.

I’ll be back with more in a couple of weeks :)