Sending Mail in 2022

It seems that we need a tech event around transactional emails in our applications. Lacking that, we are writing down our experience rebuilding email in Koliseo 3. Fasten your belts, because there is a bit of good, and a lot of bad and ugly. We knew our previous implementation lacked

Testing Firestore Rules from Java without @firebase/rules-unit-testing

We wanted to test Firestore Security Rules in Java, without installing @firebase/rules-unit-testing

Prettier for Java

Do you spend a lot of time formatting Java files over and over again? What? Unexpected! We too! We were considering the usual solutions to this: IDE autoformat, git hooks, manual tweaking. At some point, we wondered: do we have anything like Prettier, but for Java? Yup. jhipster/prettier-javaPrettier Java

Format a Date interval in Java

At the time of this writing, there are a gazillion ways to print dates in Java: * SimpleDateFormat (deprecated, use java.time instead) * Joda time [https://www.joda.org/joda-time/] (deprecated, use java.time instead) * Threeten [https://www.threeten.org/] (deprecated, use java.time instead) * Java 8 Date/Time API [https:

Limit the size of files uploaded with Signed URLs on Google Cloud Storage

Our users need to upload an image to modify their account avatar or the banner to be used for an event. Leaving aside image cropping, resizing and format – which are more than enough for a separate post –, we will focus on uploading files using Signed URLs [https://cloud.google.com/

Processing Stripe subscriptions using Webhooks

We are implementing paid plans on Koliseo (free, professional, enterprise) using Stripe Subscriptions. Long story short, this is the output from Stripe CLI [https://stripe.com/docs/stripe-cli] when a user switches from a free to a paid plan using Stripe Checkout [https://stripe.com/docs/payments/checkout]: 2020-09-05 08:

Featured

Hiatus

TL;DR, we are going to take some time off to rebuild our platform to reflect better who we are and what we want to achieve. 2020 is the year where we rebuild ourselves. We are a small bootstrapped company, which allows us to do things that others in the

Concurrency in Java: The Big Picture

We have been playing with multithreading in Java for some time and would like to share our findings, and how they have changed the way we understand the concurrency model. Please understand that we are no experts on this. When we started, this is what we knew: * Creating threads is

Run Java tests against the Firestore emulator

It's not widely documented how to do this, right? You have a test suite that you want to run against Firestore emulator, which should get started and stopped automatically while the tests are running. In this case, we will be using Java. Connecting to local Firestore is quite

Fine-tuning JavaScript chunks with Webpack 4

As many developers out there, we used to concatenate and minify our JavaScript codebases, because performance matters. We would try to reduce as much as possible the number of requests to the server, and maybe extract our most repeated dependencies (react, date-fns, maybe one or two lodash libraries not yet

Caching dependencies with Google Cloud Build and GCS

Cloud Build is a managed CI/CD environment, of which we are happy users. However, our test suite was taking about ten minutes to run, so we thought about speeding things up by caching our dependencies on GCS.

Folks, accessibility is hard

Our engineering team often finds issues that we qualify as "last mile issues": you are 90% there, now there is just an additional 90% of work to finish this. It turns out accessibility is precisely one of these topics. Strike this off as one of those features where

A New Design for the Agenda

So we were last week doing a small change, as people do, when things transformed – slowly – from a small easy change into a huge refactor thing: > It was going to be an easy week, and then we brought a simple CSS refactor to a Yak Shaving party — Koliseo Engineering

An easier talk selection process

For events with hundreds of talks, the selection process is a daunting task. The commitment of some communities can sometimes bring content by the truckload, and having to evaluate hundreds or thousands of proposals is not easy. At three minutes per talk, five hundred proposals can consume 25 hours, pauses

Our commitment to diversity

Putting together a diverse agenda with a representative amount of male and female speakers is hard. All events can benefit from a multifaceted discussion, but you need proper tools to help. This is the reason why we have added a new feature to your Request for Proposals that shows talk

Automatic Invoices. No, seriously.

Invoicing is like the ugly cousin nobody likes to mention at parties. It's complicated from a legal perspective, full of weird rare cases, and hard to get it right for more than one country. Then there is this thing: past a certain price range, every professional event needs

You are offline

The agenda for this year [https://2017.codemotion.es/agenda.html] is the source of truth for Codemotion 2017. It displays up-to-the-minute information, supports filtering by technology and free text, collects feedback about the speakers and favorite talks that you want to attend. Starting this week, the agenda will also

Our open source projects

Today's post is not about us, it's about others. We believe in sharing. We have built our software around the idea than when you open source code, you're not just helping yourself but contributing to help others. This post is about the stuff that

Changes are coming

Software development can be a lot like housework. You can move a table or add a picture, things that everyone will notice as soon as they enter your home. Or you can, say, clean the house, redo the plumbing, paint the outside, huge things that are important but will go

SEO for event ticketing

Search Engine Optimization is not an easy topic. In a world full of truths, half-truths and plain lies, it's good to start covering some base facts. If you are new to this, we can recommend The Google Webmaster Academy [https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6001102] to get

Responsive Web Design in Koliseo

The best event interface can look like crap if it doesn't include awesome background images to get the point across. At Koliseo we are not shy of experimenting: * Include videos in the event page: We did that in the early platform, but it looked awful when real people

Lower fees for 2015

You don't hear everyday that someone is planning to lower their prices. This year, using Koliseo to sell your events is cheaper than ever: * This is a 56% drop of our old ticket fee. * The same fee is applied to all supported means of payment. * Free tickets means

Actions in your GMail Inbox

This is one of these rare situations where we integrated a feature before it was released by Google. A couple of months ago we jumped ahead of the wagon and included actions with our tickets [https://developers.google.com/gmail/actions/]. Last month this feature got out of beta and

New blog! Yay!

Our current status: * Move to a brand new blog platform that looks awesome and makes it super-easy to create new content -> Done. * Introduce into Koliseo all those crazy features that we mentioned while drunk at the New Year's Eve party -> In progress... We are

Mailing with style

You know these days when you want to share how great your new e-mail templates are, but at the same time hiding how embarrassing they used to be? Yep. For us, that would be Friday. Since November, all e-mails sent by Koliseo (ticket confirmation, ticket sale alerts, invitations, whatever) will