How To Survive a Ground-Up Rewrite Without Losing Your Sanity

How To Survive a Ground-Up Rewrite Without Losing Your Sanity

Developers tend to spectacularly underestimate the effort involved in such a rewrite (more on that below), and spectacularly overestimate the value generated (more on that below, as well).

Actions in Gmail

gmail actions

I think this is the greatest innovation in web-based email since Gmail’s own release of large mailboxes (what was it? 1 GB?).   Web mail has all the benefits of a website, but offers greater contextual focus.   Adding specific actions to message has been a possible with extensions and plugins for a long time, but those were traditionally added by the recipient.  Giving such power to the sender is quite interesting.

Of course, there will be a variety of misuses – spam, phishing, etc – but, I’m sure there will be an even greater variety of useful functionality.  Like this “Send money with Gmail” example.  Here is more information on what’s possible.

Sendy – Amazon SES-based bulk email software

Sendy – Amazon SES-based bulk email software

Sendy is a self hosted email newsletter application that lets you send trackable emails via Amazon Simple Email Service (SES). This makes it possible for you to send authenticated bulk emails at an insanely low price without sacrificing deliverability.

Quinico web insights

Quinico web insights

Quinico is an open source web application designed to help you easily improve your website’s performance, reduce errors and optimize for search engines (SEO).  Quinico can constantly monitor your websites and alert you when there is a problem that requires attention.  Using Quinico, you can automate the continual tracking, reporting and alerting of the following:

  • Google search engine rankings of all of your important keywords (supports all google domains and languages)
  • Google Pagespeed metrics including suggestions for improvement (mobile and desktop strategies)
  • Page weight breakdown (mobile and desktop strategies)
  • SEO url metrics (utilizing SEOMoz)
  • Webpagetest performance metrics (including first and repeat views)
  • Google webmaster metrics (keyword impressions/clicks, crawl errors, top search queries)