Do you know how email tracking works? In this blog post we will look at some of the basics of email tracking. A few years ago, I was working on this open source software called Mail for Good by Freecodecamp. https://github.com/freeCodeCamp/mail-for-good It was a software used by Freecodecamp and many NGOs for their email campaign management. It was built on top of Amazon Web Services (AWS) Simple Email Service (SES) which costed around $1 for 10,000 emails at that time.

Let me start with the beginning of the story of the team when I wasn’t present. I know only some details about this which I was told by the team members. I know better about what happened after I joined, but given my bad memory, I can only recall some of the important moments. Also, it was around a 2 year journey. I’ll try to recall as much as possible 😅

I have always been curious about internals of some systems, if not all. One of them is the CI/CD system and how it works with source code hosting services. Apparently it’s not too complicated. So, let’s dive and see what are the different ways CI/CD systems work with source code hosting services So, what’s actually the thing that I was curious about? I was to curious to understand how a CI/CD pipeline runs for exactly a given commit especially when there are pushes to the source code immediately in a matter of a few moments / seconds, but pipeline for both runs only after a few moments but at the same time but with correct commit in each.

Based on some recent experience, I have noticed how one can easily store secrets in plain text files and things could go very wrong. First off, some people store secrets in plain text files in their git repositories by mistake Only for example purposes, below are some links https://github.com/UnravelAI/unravel-api/commit/c0599c4d798c8333b8a1c643d1e02dbec4a7cc1d https://github.com/steppingcloudlabs/single-tenant-alumniportal/commit/f99e126fd1d8e486ac81e2e3d77aa14424ad525f I just had to do a GitHub search https://github.com/search?q=aws+credentials+env&type=commits And I found the above. Fortunately the people who removed the keys from their git repository knew that the git history would contain it and hence revoked the keys and rotated it to get new keys.

A lot of times it good to have a lot of access in the systems we interact with. This could be any system - external systems or internal systems. For example, git / source code repository access is a pretty common thing. Let’s say your team has a private repository on GitHub. You can have any kind of access to this repository - read access, write access, or even admin access, for example to change settings and what not.

In our world, money is something that has become essential to buy things and live life. A lot of us work for hours and hours every day, every week. We get paid very little or maybe a lot. And then after this, many of us don’t think much about money. Very few people talk about savings, investments, money. Everyone’s talking about physical fitness and physical health, mental health, career stuff. I have rarely seen people talk about money.

If you have not heard of Hashicorp Consul before, then this bytes (short) post is going to be interesting! Consul is an interesting software that has a lot of features, which is a boon and a bane I guess. One of the features it has is - it has a Key Value (KV) store A Key Value (KV) store is a kind of data storage software that helps you store data in the form of key value pairs.

Note that this is completely based on my experience and research from a user perspective, having used some open source for a cost and seen cost for open source software Open source and money is an interesting topic. Many who are new to open source might wonder what’s powering open source software. It is true that many open source projects, especially the small ones, probably are written and maintained by one person or a few people, at no cost.

MailCatcher is a nice little tool to help you run a dummy email server It’s open source - https://github.com/sj26/mailcatcher Why would one use it? There are two use cases for which I personally used it for. One is - trying out a program in local which needs an email server as part of setup. I couldn’t setup an email server like the ones people do in production environments or use email services like AWS Simple Email Service, as I was only simply trying out the program and not doing a production deployment.

TLDR Assertions in programming generally have “expected” and “actual” value to check if the “actual” value is equal to the “expected” value. When the programmer provides the two values in the wrong order to the assertion library then when errors occur, they are confusing to read. Getting the order of “expected” and “actual” value can be helpful to get a sensible error message which one can read and understand the issue when errors occur in assertion.