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Jérémie Drouet
Jérémie Drouet

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Hacktoberfest, the good kick

Jolimail Overview

Before joining Docker and then Datadog, I used to build applications for clients. Each application had to have a way to send transactional emails and the available solutions for that were never awesome, nor installable on premise.

Last year I decided to make a big move from the JS environment to Rust and decided to implement the nice MJML Framework in Rust.

From that, came Catapulte which is a microservice that only generate emails, interpolates variables and sends the email.

But the solution given by Catapulte was not what I expected: you still had to develop the template by hand and put it in the Catapulte container you run in production.

From that, was born Jolimail which allows you to edit the Mjml template in the browser and have a direct preview. And the big advantage of the Rust implementation is that everything is running in the browser. As opposed to MJML that cannot run in the browser and has to make a backend call each time you have to render your template.

The other advantage is, although we don't have a WYSIWYG editor yet, that anybody can edit a template in Jolimail, make several different versions, but only publish the one they want when they're ready.


My Hacktoberfest Experience

As of today, the whole suite is working, you can host a Jolimail instance and a Catapulte instance, and send emails.

The main features to come will be to implement a WYSIWYG editor and another microservice to have the confirmation of reception for the emails.


What I Learned From Hacktoberfest

You've to make a checklist and stick to it. When you work on your own project, you can be easily distracted. You don't have a constraint (maybe time) on what you've to do, so you easily digress. So, to be sure you don't go out of the way, make a checklist and go!

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