Bron Gondwana

@Nithin @JoannaStern Mutt, obvs. But Eudora was good for its day

@JoannaStern Was there ever a good email client?

Is there a great Mac email client? Like an actual great one where I won't find myself going back to Gmail web four days later.

@aheckler Why not get Claude to build a local jmap client :) I’d like to do it but I’d like to get jmap contacts and calendars more! Plus we don’t understand the security and performance risks enough to release something general quickly.

@BronGondwana Any ETA (even a rough one!) for a Fastmail-integrated MCP server? I'd love to ask questions of all my email over the years! Debating whether to wait for y'all to build something or just have Claude make me something. :)

@JackEllis @MarcusAnthony Appreciate the review :) it was a pleasure talking with you.

@MarcusAnthony Agree. We did a podcast ep with @BronGondwana and he was a really nice & genuine guy. Low ego and intelligent.

Genuinely impressed with Stripe. Raised a problem we have with one of their products and I've already heard back from multiple people who work on that specific product.

@iamkarunr Sorry, I can't help with international payments! We're using Paddle to capture all our payments in India - and they require the card be saved, which makes it look like a recurring payment to the bank I guess :(

@BronGondwana FastMail support is trying to help, but no luck yet. I’m trying to pay you guys for 3 years using my Indian credit card, but apparently RBI guidelines do not allow us to make recurring payments. Any chance you can help? It has something to do with an e-mandate

@_Felipe Yeah legit. We’ve been running our own infra for >20 years and our total downtime has got to be up there too. We’re pretty good though and it’s mostly self inflicted

Not that anyone would notice, but if 37signals systems go down at some point we are going to pile on dhh in proportion to his arrogance.

@TechTh0ughts I mean, it's pretty clearly going to happen. The pre-conditions and the incentives align. Why wouldn't it.

- @BronGondwana fastmail.com/blog/not-writt…

"In the novel 1984, the “Ministry of Truth” has a whole massive department which rewrites history." 1/2

@simoncase78 @iamharaldur @Westpac One of these days I’m going to post my entire qvalent rant. I left Westpac over their awful “security”. It was a case study in how to do things wrong.

Sounds like @Westpac They once had an All In call once a month or so to suggest innovative ideas I suggested a feature for ATM's, where if you list your card, you could put in your accou t number and pin, and DOB etc and get a max of $100 out, so you could get home etc. They literally laughed at me. The exec manager very high up, in charge of encouraging us to innovate, laughed at my suggestion. I was a senior business improvement manager at fhe time. I was later fired fir refusing the jab, although I already worked 100% from home. In my 20 odd years there, they spent close to a billion dollars trying to replace their core banking platform (still usong COBALT), and they failed. They gave up, and said it could not be done. Seriously. @Westpac surely has to be top 10 worst managed businesses on planet earth.

@travelvc @nixcraft @dansync @UTAS_ Johnny come lately! We were running FreeBSD for @UTAS_ compsci dept (depravitas) back in 98/99. And I was running Redhat and openbsd for Jfh. I started using Debian in 2000 at netizen.

@nixcraft Me and @dansync ran Debian Woody 3.0 for @UTAS_ students in our computer science society to host free websites in their ~/public_html folder... back in 2002. Can we still upgrade?

How long do you wait before you upgrade Debian Linux 12 to 13? - professional answer: couple of months until the bugs are fixed i.e. 13.1 release 🤓 - fanboi answers: ASAP 🤣

@ketels_stef I haven’t looked at it yet. I’d want to get calendars and contacts in place first and check the security properties, don’t know much about MCP yet

It's like answering "why do you want to date me?" with "I'm horny and you're not too unattractive". Might be true, but it's not gonna get you many dates! As a person hiring, I'm sure dhh agrees that the goal is to find a person who'll be a good fit, has the needed skills, and will stick around. So something along the lines of "I need the money but also will provide commensurate value such that your giving me that money will be mutually beneficial"

@dhh i understand the value of written communication skills, but if the underlying message of "why I want THIS job" is "i'm unemployed, its a tough market and I need the money" would you be turned away? Or do you need them to write some fake fodder about being a great opportunity?

A good cover letter is always the first gate for landing a job at 37signals. I don't care if we're the last company to require them, we're never going to hire someone who can't write a single, personal, fluent page on why they want THIS job. world.hey.com/jason/cover-le…

Here's what I wrote in 2003 that got me the job at Fastmail! ... What attracts me most to this role is the ability to get on with programming, rather than spending all my time in meetings. My current job has crept towards more management than programming. " no meetings with marketing to attend, no "team building exercises" to get dragged along to..., you'll be just *writing* *code* !" I'm also interested in doing more in the area of email managment: my work with Squirrelmail has led me to a number of ideas for how to improve web based email access, but no time to develop them! >Required skills: >To join our team, you will need to be an expert in Perl, object-oriented >programming, and Web development. Check, check and check. I've been working with Perl as my preferred language since 1998 when I discovered it for building sysadmin helper scripts when I ran the college computer network at Jane Franklin Hall in Hobart. I tend to use a blend of functional and OO styles in my day-to-day perl writing: functional in the deep loops where speed is essential and OO for the nice reusable interfaces to the higher-level functions. OO is also handy for encapsulating (actually, more caching) data and providing a measure of "late binding", loading resources as they are first used and then keeping them around to speed later accesses. My first big project at Netizen in 2000 was newsbet.com, an online betting site written in mod_perl and postgresql (until then I'd done mysql and CGI exclusively). I was attracted to the power of mod_perl, and have used it for most projects since then. For the past 2 years I have been writing and maintaining a fairly large set of mod_perl/Text::Template based code for the data management systems at Quintiles HRS (including a patch to Text::Template to stop memory leaks). I have been to a talk on mod_perl pre-2.0 and read most of the documentation, but not yet had time to test it. Other relevant skills are an ability to write fluent SMTP, POP3 and IMAP4 (well, apart from the more complex searches, I've been playing with building an IMAP4 server in Perl, and RFC 2060 looks nice and easy until you hit searching) and lots of character set conversion/UTF8/XML goodness. At 3d3.com I build a couple of interfaces to credit-card handling b2b (hate the term) systems. >As a committed programmer, you should be able to show us an >impressive portfolio of your work, such as in open source projects, >contributing to the Perl community, or developing new frameworks in a >commercial context. Unfortunately most of the best code I've written over the past few years belongs to QHRS, and I'm not allowed to disclose it, but I have made small contributions to the open-source community (see the list in my CV for the ones I remembered while writing it). Some of my ideas are still vapourware due to lack of time to work on them. Some examples are attached below, and I can deliver more on request. Unfortunately my personal server (brong.net) is being moved this week (it's hosted at Vicnet who are moving their server room), so I can't provide reliable web links. >Salary is negotiable -- tell us what you think you're worth! My current salary is AU $85,600 per year plus super. I also have an ADSL connection (Internode 512/128) and a laptop (Toshiba TE2100 with 512Mb mem) provided by my current employer. I am interested in a similar package. Interesting things I've written: -------------------------------- travel.brong.net: this website was designed in rather a hurry before travelling through Europe for 4 months. My goals were to make it easy to access from dodgy internet cafes where I would have nothing but a web browser to make changes. For this reason the entire system is managed through carefully crafted email messages. It's not a very flexible system, because I knew how long we'd be gone for, so hard coded everything. The messages already sent could managed through webmail or ssh, and the arrival of any new message triggered a rebuild of the entire site. It's not terribly efficient or well written code (I didn't really understand the HTML library behind the calendar code, so that's a bit cargo-culted), but it did the job. Attachment: travel.tar.gz Postfix virtual map builder: I host a couple of domains for friends as well as one for a choir I sometimes sing with (mucs.aicsa.org.au), and wanted to allow the users to update email aliases for their own domains without having to maintain them myself. The attached script is run by 'dnotify' whenever any file in the watched directory is modified (so the user can use ftp or scp without having to prod any script). It runs as root to restart postfix, and is a slight DOS risk, but I do trust my users enough. Attachment: build_virtualdir.pl Ceridian.pm: My current work, in their infinite wisdom, have decided to use a timesheeting system called Ceridian, based on Peoplesoft, and running on a server in the UK. The joys of a big company. Anyway, their web interface is a large flock of dodgy javascript flying in something approximating close formation, and frequently loses data, being bloated, buggy and, well, crap. Luckily it has variables defined one per line in a not-too-insane way, and being web based, is easy enough to automate. The attached library can download the current timesheet, grab project and work codes, and upload new timesheets. This is attached to a much larger lump of code which actually provides a sane interface to the timesheet, but that's built on our GoCRF architecture (giving digital signatures, audit trails, ability to grant others ability to view or edit your details, etc), and isn't owned by me (I wrote Ceridian.pm in my own time before I was given approval to spend time on the project, sometimes that's the only way to get anything done in a large organisation). Attachment: Ceridian.pm Royal Melbourne Hospital ICU - Advise: Advise is an expert system to assist ICU doctors with antibiotic prescriptions. My role was to build a system which obtained pathology results. Our original plan was to build a web scraper to pull information from their CIS (Clinical Information System) internal web tool, but the data there was only released results, and we wanted immediate access even before the results were officially released because of the high-speed turnaround required in ICU. The only interface we could use was a DOS application called PLS32, which has a very dodgy "CSV like" output mode (escaping delimiters, what's that?), which is driven using Microsoft Sciptit to throw keystrokes at the application, and then waits until the CSV file is written to disk and reads it into a Firebird (interbase) database. Because it's all guess work (send keystrokes and hope), the application has to be updated every time the PLS32 interface gets changed (far too often!) XML and CSV files per patient are written to disk for Advise and other tools to read, and an Apache 2 based CGI interface with audit trail of accesses is also available for people to check data directly. I'm very proud of what we've achieved in such an unfriendly environment. Attachment: vids.tar.gz Templator.pm: This is a wrapper around mod_perl used within a lot of our systems, but I wrote this before I signed the "all my ideas are belong to you" IP thing, so I feel comfortable showing it. This is used by Handler.pm to provide paramter handling and an easy interface to output, as well as convenience functions within the template. Attachment: Templator.pm Summary of attachments: * resume.txt (brong.net/resume.txt) My current resume (not targetted, as I've done plenty of targetting in my cover letter!) * points.txt Addressing specific points on the commingenhancements list. * travel.tar.gz (travel.brong.net) The website generation tool that I built for keeping our diaries and travel details while overseas. * build_virtualdir.pl A little tool to allow low-maintainance management of postfix virtual tables for people who are trusted not to be evil, but not trusted to avoid making stupid mistakes. * Ceridian.pm An example web scraping tool written for QHRS. * vids.tar.gz The scripts and libraries used by the Advise data extraction system at Royal Melbourne Hospital. * Templator.pm Finally, something that does mod perl (though this isn't the handler itself) I look forward to hearing from you. Regards, Bron.

@dhh I would love to see some examples of great cover letters you've received!

@dhh I applied for precisely one job in my entire time at my previous job. I wrote a really good cover letter and guess what, it worked. I agree, you want someone to do more than just swipe right on your company.

@nathan288573 No, JMAP is not related to this use case at all. JMAP allows you to more easily create and submit email to a server, but not send to an arbitrary other internet user with no intermediation.

@BronGondwana Understood, thank you for taking the time to respond. Do we agree that in a world governed by JMAP, this would be easily achievable?

@BronGondwana As of today, is there a (simple) way to reliably send and receive email directly from a typical home/office computer to another computer or to traditional email providers using just your IP address or even a locally hosted server on a standard internet connection?

@nathan288573 My maybe "hot take" on this is that that's a good thing. The random office or home PC isn't set up to handle returned email, or to keep retrying if the remote site is down.

@nathan288573 No, not to a random host on the internet, because your typical home/office computer will likely have an outbound firewall blocking SMTP, plus it's unlikely to have all the right DNS records in place - and that's likely to get worse. You need to authenticate to a smarthost.

@slimjimmy Play on words. I’ve got bin/humans/, bin/robots/ and good old utils/ in the repo and consistency is better than just about anything else. *sigh*. Half done migrations are the worst

@BronGondwana why?

“the name ‘utils’ is a smell” what you gonna call it then? - common - shared - support - helpers - lib i’d love to know the thought process behind: “a utils dir is a smell. better use a synonym” my god

@anothercohen Yeah, it's particularly bad for Fastmail where we have hundreds of thousands of users with email addresses at our domains... guess which company it suggests they worked at. Anyway - I have a LOT more employees than I realised. An

Still incredible to me that LinkedIn doesn’t add any verification to prove you work or previously worked at a company. You can literally just say you worked anywhere

@jasonfried I just started my second time though. First time worked great but I stopped wearing my retainer because of an infected tooth which moved and was eventually extracted. This time just minor recorrection. It’s annoying but perfectly livable and the end result was good for me

Anyone out there used Invisalign? I just started to correct a long-standing minor bite/grinding issue I've had, but feeling like I prefer that issue to wearing these damn trays. I appreciate that they exist, but I think I'm going to live with my imperfection instead.

@sentreh Joy. Welcome to the “club”. Pity they’re a legit org and we have users who really use them so we can’t just block at the edge.

@BronGondwana Hey Bron, I received one of these the other day too! It was also to an email address that only appears once in a blog post from 2 years ago, and interestingly does not appear in HIBP. I'm a Fastmail user as well so I found that to be a weird coincidence

Sitting at a standards conference -- working to improve email for everybody, I blogged about a particularly bad email experience I had this week! fastmail.com/blog/not-ok-cu…