Posted by & filed under Uncategorized.

We’re excited to announce that we were featured on Beta List over the weekend: http://betali.st/startups/turret-io

Thanks to all who signed up so far!

Posted by & filed under Go, Web development.

We’ve released v1 of Golapa — an App Engine launch page written in Go that allows a web startup to begin building a mailing list of interested leads. Content is easily editable using the existing templates and CSS is generated using Sass.

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Posted by & filed under Cassandra, Python, Web development.

We use Cassandra pretty heavily. With all of its advantages, one pain point for us has been the python-cassandra driver’s connection speed. Today, I finally dove into the code to figure out if I could squeeze out a little more juice or if I’d need to start caching results to keep our pages loading quickly.

I discovered a potential issue (which has been submitted to Datastax https://github.com/datastax/python-driver) that forces Cassandra to fetch the metadata for all keyspaces each time the client connects to the cluster. A tweak to provide only the keyspace being used showed significant performance improvements (as much as 50%).

We’re only running this in our experimental environment, so I’m not even going to post the patch because this could cause some serious issues for people. However, I’m happy to report that it does seem as though there can be some speed improvements made one way or another.

Posted by & filed under Go.

turret.io relies on Go for a lot of its email handling. One thing we  noticed during development was that while Go currently has support for a quoted printable decoder it didn’t have an encoder.  This is surely not optimized yet and it also doesn’t implement Go’s native io.Writer interface, but it serves its purpose for now.

It’s available here: http://github.com/turretIO/goQPR

Posted by & filed under Email.

There’s a fair amount of confusion around the usage of SenderID and SPF records, and rightly so — their syntax is nearly identical and they both seem to do the same thing. So, what’s the deal?

If you’d like to read the full history on them both, feel free to checkout the Wikipedia articles which I won’t reiterate here (SPF and SenderID).

Email is incredibly easy to forge. So easy that I can send you can email from my laptop claiming to be “From” you@yourdomain.com and when you receive that email you’ll see whatever I placed in the “From” field in your inbox. This is what makes phishing and other online email scams so easy to pull off.

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