Some events you look forward to for an entire year. JSConf is one of those events. Last year, we had a great time in Portland. This year, we’ll not only be there, we’re very excited to be sponsoring a really fun suprise for everyone. If you’re coming to the conference or are attending any of the parties, @aq, @talltyler, and @mrb_bk will be there, so make sure you say hello.

Looking forward to seeing everyone in Scottsdale!

Text customization is a big part of our card creation process here at Paperless Post. We want to enable users to easily create beautiful and unique cards. One feature we thought would be cool would be for the user to be able to foil stamp or gold emboss text, which would give text a texturized silver or gold effect.

At a company that relies on open source software, every day is an adventure. This week: how a memory fragmentation issue in node.js tempted me into the wilds of the V8 JavaScript Engine and C++.

At Paperless Post we rely on a lot of different Open Source software, from the Nginx web server that serves our traffic, to the PostgreSQL RDBMS that we use to keep our data safe and secure. One of the more interesting is Redis: the advanced key/value store that has gone from an obscure project by an old school Linux hacker to a gigantic Open Source project backed by VMWare and used in production environments all over the world.

Redis is so interesting because it is very compact and flexible. By reading the source code and keeping in touch with the community around the software, we’ve picked up some helpful tricks, and I thought the Paperless Post Dev Blog would be a great place to share some. Today I’ll be talking about using Redis in a persistence-only slave setup, and a relatively new feature for tracking slow queries called the slowlog.

I’m proud to announce a new open source project that we’ve been cooking up behind the scenes at Paperless Post. Graphiti is a powerful front end for the real-time graphing engine, Graphite. Graphiti provides a whole new way of creating and storing graphs. We’re using it day-to-day at Paperless as a way to monitor our infrastructure and product metrics. We’re especially excited because it’s the first part of our internal tools to be open sourced under the paperlesspost organization.