I’m getting a client up and running on EngineYard’s Cloud offering, and it has been a pleasure. One of the things I’ve appreciated about using it is that I’m forced (in a good way) to use Chef, which is awesome.

It goes without saying that email is the de facto method by which online businesses communicate with users and clients; without a doubt, it’s a necessary and core function of business today. That being the case, how does a business know that its  email is actually getting delivered?

Despite how significant email is, there’s confusion and a general lack of education about why email may or may not make it to its destination. So, I’ve spent some time putting together some helpful tips, and just as importantly, a list of things you want to be sure to avoid.

Episode #095. Dan Benjamin (Playgrounder, Hivelogic) is back this week and we keep it quick while still packing in the news.

Not all message queues are made equal. In the simplest case, a message queue is synonymous with an asynchronous protocol in which the sender and the receiver do not operate on the message at the same time. However, while this pattern is most commonly used to decouple distinct services (an intermediate mailbox, of sorts), the more advanced implementations also enable a host more advanced recipes: load balancing, queueing, failover, pubsub, etc.