In this episode of Running in Production, Justin Duke goes over building an email newsletter service. It’s mostly hosted on Heroku and has has been up and running since late 2016.

Justin talks about how he handles sending out 100k+ emails, having a mix of Django templates and DRF + Vue, using rq to schedule emails, scaling with Heroku, balancing out what events to keep track of, how to figure out which features to develop and so much more.

Topics Include

3:50 – It’s a weeknights / weekend project and dealing with 100k+ email spikes
11:42 – Motivation for using Django, choosing “boring tech” and email validation
20:08 – It’s a monolithic app in a mono repo but broken up into ~8 Django apps
27:48 – It used to be mostly a DRF API back-end with Vue on the front-end
30:04 – Storybook is a tool for developing UI components
32:06 – Useful Python / Django libraries that were helpful for this project
35:39 – Spending an innovation token on using websockets for link checking
41:10 – rq is a powerhouse for scheduling and sending emails in the background
47:35 – Dealing with issues and errors when sending emails out at scale
50:43 – Sentry and Datadog make for a great duo of services
54:19 – Using Stripe and avoiding dark patterns around subscription pausing
59:35 – A few strategies to prevent bad actors from sending email spam
1:03:09 – Reasons for going with Heroku to host most things (roughly 12 dynos)
1:12:13 – A few Heroku add-ons and plugins that are being used
1:16:37 – The deployment process from development to production
1:21:26 – Dealing with database and front-end changes with zero down time deploys
1:28:10 – Performing database backups and backing up other user uploads
1:34:45 – Getting notified of errors if something goes wrong
1:37:53 – Best tips? Framing out when and where to record things (ie. events, etc.)
1:43:19 – Using Notion to track bugs, roadmaps and collect user feature requests
1:47:23 – Justin has a personal site and check out Buttondown

Links

📄 References

⚙️ Tech Stack

🛠 Libraries Used

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