Mailcoach's (lack of) JavaScript stack

Yee-haw, we released Mailcoach! Mailcoach is a self-hosted newsletter solution. My contributions were on the JavaScript side of things: I helped decide which tech stack to use, and implemented it.

After building apps with almost exclusively Vue and React the past few years, we decided to go with vanilla JavaScript for Mailcoach. There's no frontend framework involved, but we're pulling in some npm packages where needed.

I'm not going to dive into implementation details. I'm going to talk about why we decided on this stack and go in-depth on the structure of the application code, bundle sizes, and choosing external dependencies.

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My favorite part of our company website

Some time last year, we released the latest iteration of the Spatie.be website.

Our company homepage, screenshot taken on 2019-06-17

There's a succinct description of what we're about, followed by a peculiar little block, dubbed "Latest insights from the team".

Unlike other agencies, we don't have a company blog. We encourage everyone to write on their own blog and put their latest articles in the spotlight.

Everyone keeps ownership of their content.

There's nothing fancy backing this feature, blog entries are synced via RSS. If you're interested in implementing something similar in PHP, our source code is available on GitHub.

Introducing our company guidelines site

We just open sourced our company guidelines site! We previously kept the contents in a private wiki on GitHub, but I'm glad we finally put the time in giving the contents a real home.

Like our docs site, the content is stored in markdown files, which can directly be edited on GitHub. The site deploys whenever something's pushed to the master branch.

As for why we decided to open source it all...

This site contains a set of guidelines we use to bring our projects to a good end. We decided to document our workflow because consistency is one of the most valuable traits of maintainable software.

The contents of this site exist for ourselves—more importantly, our future selves—and for giving future collegues a reference to our way of doing things and their quirks. The guidelines cover workflow, code style, and other little things we consider worth documenting.

The guidelines are available on guidelines.spatie.be.