One of my favorite parts of working at Paperless Post is being involved in our internship program. Each summer for the past three years, we’ve brought on an increasing number of students who are at various points in their college careers, but have one important thing in common: they want to see how a startup works from the inside. We do everything we can to get these students in front of real work as soon as possible, starting off with a “bootcamp” that introduces them to our process and technology stack, and then immediately assigning them to one of our internal teams. We asked two of our interns to talk a bit about what they worked on. They were excited to share and so are we!

Over the summer, I’ve been traveling around a bit speaking at meetups and conferences sharing how Paperless Post thinks about metrics. Its been a fun and interesting experience and not only have I gotten some great feedback, it’s helped me formulate my thoughts to bring back to the team.

Our interface designers came up with several registration form views, but didn’t know which view would perform the best and wanted to compare them in the field. A/B testing with Google Website Optimizer was kicked around as a solution, but I stumbled across this excellent article by Steve Hanov explaining how to easily implement a “multi-armed bandit” library (we used more than 20 lines). This article is excellent, and I encourge you to implement something similar on your website if you have multiple UIs and doubts about which is the best.

For our next talk we found one of our favorite NYC developers and technologists, David Nolen aka @swannodette. We saw David speak at this year’s JS Conf and were nodding our heads the entire time. Since then, we’ve been following his recent forays into logic programming, Lisp, and ClojureScript with great admiration. With that in mind, we’re very excited to have him share his latest ideas with us.

Thursday, August 23rd 2012 at 7PM

Paperless Post,
151 W. 25th St., 9th Floor,
New York, NY

Space is limited and RSVP’s are required. Please RSVP here: http://paperless.ly/S4UhlH

We first blogged about Graphiti, our open source alternate front end to Graphite back in December of 2011, and have been happily using it in production at Paperless Post for about 6 months now. We get a lot of great feedback about Graphiti, mostly positive, but one question comes up a lot about a design choice we made when writing the library: “Why the dependency on Amazon S3?”

At first we was a bit confused that people didn’t understand what was so cool about it, until we realized that we never took the time to explain it. In this quick post, we’ll reveal three awesome ways we use Graphiti that wouldn’t be possible without Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) or an equivalent place to serve and store image snapshots.