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This week, my technical apprenticeship at Sailthru (through General Assembly) officially comes to an end. As such, I thought I’d take a quick look back at my initial goals and objectives to provide a short debrief on my experience overall… Continue reading codeblog: a glance back at a quick 12 weeks

Justin posted this to LMB a week or two back, so I’m playing a little catch-up game here, but I’m really diggin’ the vibe on this track. It’s kind of made for a nice, sunny spring day. Check it out:

There are some similarities to Tycho‘s mellow, feel-good electro, but with the added element of the vocals hitting on a catchy melody. I also really like the guitar track as the main thematic hook, and it’s all held together nicely with that thick bass guitar laying down the foundation. Good stuff.

As always, I suggest going direct to the source on this one.

I was psyched to see that the Dodos have some new tunes coming out. This is a bit of a slow creeper, but it really picks up towards the end.

For a band that used to mainly be an acoustic guitar and drums duo, this gets pretty damn riff-tastic. Kind of bummed we gotta wait until August for the full record to come out, but I’ll definitely be grabbin’ a copy and you should too.

Last week, I walked through a bit of a tutorial on how to use data feeds to populate and repeat blocks of html content in html emails for Sailthru’s personalization service.

This past week was all about digging further into JSON feeds and more specific data sets that can be passed into Sailthru’s system via APIs. Continue reading codeblog: JSON, JSON, Jason

So the past couple weeks at Sailthru, I’ve really settled into the day-to-day routine pretty nicely. We’ve had a steady amount of work, which has generally been a mix of building out raw html emails templates and programming those templates with Sailthru’s Zephyr scripting language.

I thought I’d try something new this week. Rather than doing a general overview of the work week and dropping in a few animated gifs for comedic value, I thought I’d dig into the code a bit and explain a little more about our process for adding programming snippets into html emails. Here goes… Continue reading codeblog: programming html emails with sailthru’s zephyr code

Really been digging this new Kurt Vile record….

As far as overall sound and vibe, I still think my original tweet was pretty accurate:

new Kurt Vile has a distinct vibe…kinda like one big/long sus2 chord –> ‘Wakin On A Pretty Daze’ n.pr/WWH30v via @nprmusic

— Marc Whitman (@whitperson) April 1, 2013

(go here for a bit more info on that Sus2 chord I mentioned)

Of course, like any solid album, this one takes a few listens to really grow on ya. I highly recommend picking up a copy.

This week’s coding adventure at Sailthru was fairly similar to last week, but my workload was much more varied in terms of coding HTML emails vs. actual programming (i.e. using Sailthru’s scripting language, Zephyr). I spent quite a bit more time digging through Sailthru’s dev docs to find solutions to programming challenges in order to add content and user data to a variety of email templates. Continue reading codeblog: okay, now we’re coding; what about fixing the process?

After last week’s “slice fail” and general spinning of wheels at Sailthru, I felt quite a bit more comfortable coding up html emails this week, which was the bulk of our workload.

We learned a key lesson last week, that it’s always better to code emails fresh and not rely on any kind of quick fix html export. With that in mind, I dug into the code with purpose and I was actually able to churn out two solid templates in a much shorter time than the last full template I attempted. Although it was still a pretty tedious process, I definitely felt like I was getting the knack for it and picking up some little tricks along the way. In fact, I even surprised myself when I was able to quickly dig into someone else’s rather messy code and handle a few quick fixes for an account manager who was in a time crunch. While I don’t see myself wanting to code html emails all the time, I do like being able to chalk it up as a useful arrow in my quiver of web dev tools. Continue reading codeblog: wait, i think i got this

This past week at Sailthru was all about digging back into the painful process of coding HTML emails.

First the rough spot….one of the key lessons for this week is all about coding from scratch vs. using some kind of pre-baked code or using exported code from a program. The latter can be helpful, but it’s never a panacea in the world of web development. I knew this, but now I know it even better. Continue reading codeblog: slicing & dicing….and breaking html emails

The week at Sailthru started off a bit slow, with some follow-up from last week’s first full html email coding session. Overall, my take on coding html emails from last’s weeks post still stands, but I don’t really mind it when it gets mixed in with some more programming-heavy projects. And that’s a pretty good description of this week’s workload…a mix of a few different projects. Continue reading codeblog: a gradual ramp-up, a new title, and “implementing” client dev projects