robmueller

The vCard "group construct" (see rfc6350) is one of the dumbest things ever added to a spec. It seems a trivial thing to add, but completely screws up your internal storage and manipulation formats. It's horrible, on top of all the other horribleness that is vCard.

Of course, I'm biased, given we're trying to push alternatives to IMAP, CardDAV and CalDAV - http://jmap.io/ - but please do check it out. Having actually worked on IMAP servers and clients, CalDAV servers and clients and CardDAV servers and clients, we've learned a lot about creating a saner alternative.

Comment · 12 years ago

There's actually not that much to write about. It's a regular company with share holders, the share holders just happen to be some of the staff.

Fortunately the owners all get on very well, have similar beliefs in which technical, financial and marketing directions we want to head in, and love what we do. The result is that everything just runs pretty smoothly, so far at least :)

I think I mentioned in the interview though, the difference in vibe between being owned by Opera and being owned by the staff isn't as big as you'd think. Much more important is just actually loving what you do, the things you create, and the people you work with. All of those are absolutely great, both as they were under Opera and now back under staff ownership IMHO. I wonder if other FastMail staff will have their own thoughts :)

Comment · 12 years ago

Have you tried FastMail.fm? It's not free, but has a fast web UI, excellent IMAP support, customer service, etc. Search other HN threads to see what others think of it. (disclaimer: I co-own it with some of the other staff)

Comment · 12 years ago

SSE is great. We wrote about it in quite a bit of detail a while back.

http://blog.fastmail.fm/2012/01/09/building-the-new-ajax-mai...

There's a couple of annoying caveats

1. The "retry" nature of the connection isn't quite as reliable as suggested. See the blog post above for more details

2. NAT timeouts. Make sure you have some sort of "ping" either at application or TCP level.

http://blog.fastmail.fm/2013/05/28/push-events-nat-tcp-conne... http://blog.fastmail.fm/2011/06/28/http-keep-alive-connectio...

3. Each SSE connection is regarded as a regular site connection. So if people open up 6 tabs to your site, you might suddenly find your site is unresponsive to users because every available connection is used by an SSE connection. You might need to implement some inter-tab communication system instead.

http://blog.fastmail.fm/2012/11/26/inter-tab-communication-u...

Comment · 13 years ago

Yep. But that's why we've unified the family plan levels to be the same as the personal ones.

So the only difference now is it's $5/y extra to have the family "container", which lets you create accounts in your own domain rather than having an @fastmail.fm account and aliases. Having that container then also lets you setup multiple accounts, manage them, share folders between users, etc. If you only have 1 account, then yes, it's a bit annoying, but I don't think $5/y is too onerous.

Comment · 13 years ago

Stick to IRC for the internal chats guys.

Wait, I meant email... ;)