self-hosting
-
Your Own Mail, No Open Ports
Self-hosting email is supposed to be dead. The ports are blocked, the reputation systems are rigged, and the people who tried it longest quit in public. Two founders ran their own mail anyway, on a server with no mail port open to the internet. The messages arrive over HTTPS. Here is the architecture, what it costs, and everything that broke.
-
The Weight of a Checkbox
Our own setup wizard downloaded 1.9 megabytes and made 127 network requests to put six checkboxes on the screen. We rebuilt it to make three. On a developer laptop the rebuilt path is seven times faster. On rural LTE it is nearly fifty times faster, because delay is charged per round trip and one of those paths makes 127 of them.