Krystal Labs

Anatomy of an email

Receiving and processing inbound emails is a big part of Sirportly, our help desk service. Recently I was tasked with refactoring Sirportly's email processing code, and in doing so I found myself delving through many of the original email RFCs, and learning all about the structure of emails. Although I've

A chocolate chip cookie sitting on a worktop with a small bite out of it while there are crumbs surrounding the cookie itself

Crumbs: Our cookie consent npm package

Cookies. Most of us love eating them but most likely these days we are either accepting or customising them to use most of our favourite websites. With Krystal having multiple different products under our umbrella we often have the need to have a consistent approach to certain aspects of the

Lessons learned with Hotwire

We've been using Hotwire for the past couple of months and we've largely tried to stick to the Rails way of doing things, but there have been a few times when we've been unsure on the correct approach. This article explains how we've handled flash messages, modals, and async actions.

Go

Dependency injection in Go

Go is my favourite language, and here on the Krystal Labs team we've been making good use of it on a variety of projects. It's fast enough for most uses, fits in well with some of the ecosystems we are working in (Kubernetes etc) and engineers have little trouble picking

Open Source

Apia: our API framework

The main things we want from an our APIs are for them to be self documenting, easy to develop and easy for consumers to use. There are a variety of tools out there but none of them really satisified all our goals. So, we did what we often do, we

Open Source

Postal 2.0

We handle millions of e-mails every month here at Krystal and one of the tools that helps us do that is Postal - our very own open source e-mail delivery platform. Over the last couple of years, development on Postal had been rather stagnant as we have been focusing on

Tutorials

Optimizing your MySQL server

When building a scalable web application, the first performance problem most people will encounter is with their database queries. As your database grows, it is very likely that things will slow down as the database server has to look through more and more data to find what you need. The

Tutorials

MySQL Replication for Redundancy

In this post we will discuss how we configure MariaDB multi-source replication in order to achieve database redundancy.

Android

Exploring Android's Proximity Sensor

One of the main benefits of developing applications for Android over iOS is the greater access afforded to some of the lower level API functions. Whilst developing the Dial 9 Phone app I became interested in the proximity sensor. In Android, the proximity sensor is primarily used to detect when

Tutorials

Creating a simple custom event system in JavaScript

What problem are we solving? Your front end code can quickly become unwieldy when building an application which has to react to a large variety of different events. For example, in an app using websockets it's not uncommon to see code like this: mySocket.addEventListener("message", (message) =>

Databases

MySQL Indexes Explained

In the time we've been assisting people with hosting their web applications, the most common reason we've seen for performance problems has been missing or incorrectly used database indexes, so we hope this simple introduction can help people get much more out of their databases. What are Indexes?Every time