twakefield

Rackspace - San Francisco, CA (will relocate and remote possible)

TLDR; email me if you want a great job writing software to change the world: taylor@hackrackspace.com.

Ok, it's time to make a decision…

Do you want to write closed-source software to enrichen your corporate overlords...do you want to take a flyer with a startup and do all the work without the big founder upside...or do you want to write open-source software and collaborate with other awesome devs around the world working on the leading edge of cloud computing, while making great salary and benefits?

If it's the latter, we are changing the future of cloud computing at Rackspace and collaborating with OpenStack, Docker, CoreOS and anyone else that wants to joint the OSS cloud party. Just check out our latest offering, OnMetal [1], which is a combination of open source software (OpenStack) [2] and open source hardware (OpenCompute) [3].

If you are passionate about OSS/cloud/distributed systems, we would love to have you be part of our team in SF. We have positions available in a startup environment with recent acquisitions Mailgun and Exceptional.io, as well as big, hairy distributed computing problems to solve at Rackspace. So there is something for everyone.

We are located in the SoMa neighborhood in San Francisco on 2nd St. and Folsom.

Below are some positions currently available:

* All: Get stuff done, people that are motivated to make an impact.

* All: Excited to build new products, passion for new technology, new programming models.

* Backend Engineer: Distributed systems experience, passion for large scale systems.

* Frontend Engineer: Architecting interesting fully client side apps, dashboards, live updates, etc...

* Data Engineer: Building big data systems to be used throughout the company.

* Spam Fighting Engineer (Mailgun): Finding spammers and fraudsters with smart algorithms.

* Deliverability Engineer (Mailgun): Automating email deliverability best practices into code.

* Marketing Manager (Mailgun and Exceptional.io): Taking the lead on these teams' marketing efforts.

I was a co-founder of Mailgun and I run the SF office so email me directly if you are interested: taylor@hackrackspace.com.

[1] http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/onmetal [2] https://www.openstack.org [3] http://www.opencompute.org

Rackspace - San Francisco, CA (will relocate and remote possible)

Come work at Rackspace in the heart of San Francisco (2nd and Folsom). We have 28k sq feet that we also share with Geekdom, our collaborative co-working space. Rackspace focuses on building big systems to serve other technologists and builders. Being the founder of OpenStack, we encourage OSS development and will fund time spent on OSS side projects.

There are various roles available. Below are some general outlines:

* All: Get stuff done, people that are motivated to make an impact.

* All: Excited to build new products, passion for new technology, new programming models.

* Backend Engineer: Distributed systems experience, passion for large scale systems.

* Frontend Engineer: Architecting interesting fully client side apps, dashboards, live updates, etc...

* Quality Engineering Manager: Continuous integration and deployment.

* Data Engineer: Designing and building systems to handle big data.

* Spam Fighting Engineer (Mailgun): Finding spammers and fraudsters with smart algorithms.

* Deliverability Engineer (Mailgun): Automating email deliverability best practices into code.

* Marketing managers (Mailgun and Exceptional.io): Taking the lead on these teams' marketing efforts.

H1B transfers are fine, obviously the cap on applications this year limits applications 'til next year...

I was one of the Mailgun founders and run the San Francisco office so please ping me directly, taylor.wakefield@rackspace.com

San Francisco - Full Time (Will Relocate)

Full Stack Developer At Mailgun

To apply just shoot us an email: hack@mailgun.net

Who we are:

- Mailgun is The Email Service for Developers.

- We make it easy for developers to implement email into their software.

- We're ex-YC and were acquired by Rackspace in 2012 but remain an independent product

- We move fast in a startup-like atmosphere but we have access to juicy hardware, large marketing muscle and world class data centers.

About our team:

- We love Linux, open source and enjoy contributing back.

- We have one 30 minute meeting a week and think that's enough.

- Our favorite GUI is ssh/bash, preferably served grey on black.

- We have a hot key for everything.

- Some of us have never dragged or dropped anything.

About you:

- You are an intellectually curious hacker.

- You can teach us how to do Javascript, Python, HTML and CSS right.

- You really know why REST is important in API design.

- You've managed your own memory on multiple occasions (successfully).

- You want to have an enormous impact on a product developers love.

- You believe the actor-model concurrency is a better idea.

- You know what an architecture astronaut is and you're not one.

We need help with:

- Taking care of our entire Control Panel including Javascript front-end, Python back-end and APIs

We offer:

- Competitive salary and benefits.

- Relocation to San Francisco, CA.

To apply just shoot us an email: hack@mailgun.net

Ugh. Should be fixed now. Sorry to anyone that experienced disruptions due to this stupid error.

"My favorite job was probably the year I worked at Apple retail in college, because I got to explain technology to people and change their lives in some small way"

This advice may be too specific but I'd encourage you to look into working in support at Rackspace. You seem like a good fit and it's not a typical support job. The company really values the support Rackers (the company's mission is to be one of the world's leading support organizations).

There is also a good career path, which usually leads to support team management, devops or software development.

If you want more information, feel free to ping me.

As far as I can tell, Gmail is not returning open data until the email is actually opened. Gmail is pretty good about identifying spam and putting it into recipients spam folders which is usually not opened.

I just did a quick test using Mailgun and recorded the results [1].

The TLDWatch is that Google does give you back the open event and they also give you the email address of the open since this data is encoded in the URL.

The data that is not accurate is what you would expect: IP address, geo-location and user-agent string.

We'll hopefully write a more extensive blog post shortly.

[1] http://blog.mailgun.com/post/gmail-open-tracking-test-at-mai...

You may also want to think about using our validator[1] to check the validity of the email addresses before sending.

[1] https://github.com/mailgun/flanker or http://documentation.mailgun.com/api-email-validation.html

I wonder if these concepts could be used to change the way land records are maintained and eliminate the need for title insurance [1] in the U.S. I am no expert but the current system doesn't seemed to have changed much in the past century or so. This results in a lucrative business (title insurance) that effectively insures against book keeping mistakes.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_insurance

That may be the case at the more sophisticated ISPs (gmail, yahoo, etc.) but I think it's still worth consideration. There are a lot of old school email servers and spam filters out there. I would suggest using tools like litmus and others because the "stop words" are not always intuitive.

One other suggestion that's kind of fun - put an easter egg in the text part. Depending on your customer/user base, there may be a lot of people that view text only. We've gotten some nice feedback doing that.

This is great to see and long overdue. We get a lot of customers that ask about how they should create email templates. We don't really want to go down that path, so we'll be happy to direct them here.

Also, +1 on using Litmus for testing rendering across different clients.

There are also other things to consider when designing email templates and email deliverability in general.

- Always use multi-part, with a nice text part. Not having a text part is a spam flag.

- Keep the ratios of images and links to text low. High ratios are spam flags. Also, most of the time images will not be displayed by default.

- Use common sense, avoiding exclamations and referencing spammy words (eg. buy now!).

- Avoid link shorteners (commonly used in phishing emails)

- Use Litmus to test against spam filters to see where common sense fails.

- mail-tester.com is another nice free tool for checking for spam flags.

- There are also some little things that can trip you up, like having malformed message-Ids where the domain in the message-ID does not match the sending domain.

For more thoughts, we have a best practices (http://documentation.mailgun.com/best_practices.html)

Edit: Also, PLEASE only send emails to people that have given you (like on your website) permission and you have validated the email address with a confirmation link (double opt-in) before sending subsequent emails. Always give recipients the conspicuous and easy ability to unsubscribe.

I guess I should have been more explicit. I didn't mean to strike a partisan nerve.

I didn't mean to say that the CRA was the only cause for the housing bubble. There were a lot of factors that lead to the housing bubble.

My point was that the CRA was the beginning of a decade long non-partisan policy shift that signaled to regulators, Wall Street, etc. that owning a home was an unqualified good thing and looser standards for lending against homes should be encouraged.

Once the government and regulators signal to Wall Street other investors that they are encouraging the deployment of capital to a new, loosely regulated asset class it creates a dangerous environment.

Bubbles are usually preceded by some regulatory or legislative change(s) that fuels them. This legislation usually has good intentions but falls victim of unintended consequences. For example, you can trace the housing bubble to the easing of lending standards through the modifications of the Community Reinvestment Act in the late 90s [1].

Legislation that creates new investments opportunities, coupled with cheap capital is a dangerous combination. I would not be surprised if the new JOBS Act [2] provides the spark and the Fed's loose monetary policy provides the fuel that creates a startup bubble (quickly).

Companies like Angel List [3] and Wefunder [4] have been quick to recognize this and take advantage of the new demand pockets the JOBS Act creates. Just check out their home pages.

As Sam mentions, there may be some time before it bursts, but it's very tough to figure out when it will be...and early stage company shares are not liquid.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Reinvestment_Act [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JOBS_Act [3] https://angel.co/ [4] https://wefunder.com/

This Events API effectively replaces our Logs API, which was a subset of this. The Logs API still works but we removed it from the API reference in the docs as the Events API should be used (and hopefully preferred) going forward.

There is a huge demographic (baby boomers) in the U.S. that are becoming seniors [1]. That probably has something to do with this phenomenon.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_boom

Thanks for this. Yes, we need to update our other assets to reflect the new pricing.

Unfortunately, Heroku doesn't allow for variable billing so there needs to be a fixed cost and associated limit. Although, we are in the process of reevaluating our Heroku pricing to better reflect our direct pricing and will be adjusting it shortly.

For some customers it may make sense to stay on their current pricing, which we allow for.

Our most popular feedback to date is to eliminate minimums and get rid of feature gating in plans. So, here you go.

As always, open to feedback.

CloudEmailApp, Email service for kittens: http://cloudemailapp.com/

Swiftype is one of those products that is so easy to implement, you'll think you missed a few steps. It improved the search on our docs immensely in a few minutes. I also really like the ability to easily customize results.

As a bonus, we've found an unexpected benefit of getting a feedback loop on how to improve our docs by getting a list of the most popular searches and those that have not returned results. It quickly shows us where we have holes in our documentation.

That is an alternative. Although, we have found they throttle incoming SMTP traffic pretty aggressively. I don't fault them for this - I'm sure they are bombarded by spammers.

Here's an interesting post I came across on the subject: http://www.whatcounts.com/2012/06/what-is-the-deliverability...

I work at Mailgun and this may explain why when our customers use Facebook as a customer acquisition tool they inevitably end up with a large amount of bad email addresses, leading to a poor email sending reputation or worse.

While I'm not familiar with the information Facebook shares through Facebook Connect, this seems to be a big short coming. You may not be getting the customer's real, current email addresses.

We have to tell people that Facebook is not a reliable way to obtain valid email addresses. The only way to properly do this is to have customers submit their email addresses directly to your own signup form and then validate them with a confirmation link sent to that address (double opt-in).

Yes, we should put some hard numbers out there in a subsequent post.

"Apple has a huge cash stockpile, but much of that cash is overseas. Raising money in the debt market would help Apple avoid the big tax bill that would come from bringing the cash back to the U.S."

Interesting, so one of the effects of the Fed's lose monetary policy is enabling U.S. companies to avoid taxes.

Speaking on using this with multiprocessing. AFAIK Twisted does not work well with multiprocessing – the details are not on top of my head.

So the simple way to make this work on a multi-core machine is to wrap the whole thing (including imports) into a function and spawn a pool of processes BEFORE you import Twisted, initialize the reactor, etc.

As always, we are open to any feedback to help make our webhooks better. We recently added domain toggles to them so you can add different end points for each of your domains, due to popular demand.

So, I pay $500 and I get to be on a 1 hour conference call. I can't tell if this is a joke or not.

"That $375k would then be subject to 63% taxes, netting me $138,750, or a 20% down-payment on my piece of the american dream. The other company does the right thing, so I only see a 15% capital gains tax"

A bit of an aside but could someone elaborate on this? Is the OP referring to an 83(b) election? If so, isn't that his responsibility (of course, the company should advise him to do this). Or is this referring to something else?

At any rate, my impression is that there would be California taxes as well on that income, bringing the taxes well above 15%.