How To Test Fake E-mail Addresses

…otherwise subtitled “Fake e-mail addresses aren’t so fake afterall…”

As part of an ongoing project, we needed to setup a large amount of dummy accounts, to test workflow, messaging, and other critical aspects to the system. In order to do this, we used a standard “faker” type library that allows us to easily generate as many fake names, e-mail addresses, addresses, whatever you need. We then run our unit tests, which involve sending e-mail messages through Mandrill. This worked fine until…

Getting Bamboo Build Notifications in Slack Using Zapier

Zapier to the rescue again!!! We’re using the Bamboo continuous integration platform that Atlassian provides to verify our unit tests are running before we submit pull requests. With 5 developers on a project, each touching different aspects of the code, having a solid unit test foundation is key. While “cloud” bamboo hosting has a variety of notification options, posting to a Slack channel is not one of them. However, this trick will get you running in no time.

Quick Tip: How to Create an Email Template in Airmail

Ever since Outlook started giving me grief, I’ve become a big fan of Airmail. It has a really simple and polished interface, can easily handle multiple accounts, and works really well. The one thing that is missing from Airmail though is the ability create mail templates / stationary. Since I send out “daily virtual standup” e-mails, I want a quick and easy way to get this done. Here’s a little “hack” I’ve come up with in order to have a template at my fingertips.

Quick Tip: Creating Outlook Templates for Mac

As a remote worker, I keep in touch with my colleagues by way of the “daily virtual standup”. This is a short and sweet e-mail that outlines what I did yesterday and well as what I’m going to do today. Oddly enough, Outlook for Mac does not have a mail template that I could create to send these out faster! So here’s a quick trick I use as a workaround…