Never let a nerd doing customer support

When your chart component is suddenly into modern art 🧑‍🎨

Our Webhooks are officially live today 🔥 This integration has been hidden behind a feature flag for a while. But we're stoked to enable it for all @userlist.com customers. Docs here: userlist.com/docs/integra... Please ping @benediktdeicke.com for hard technical questions 😊

We’re currently in the process of experimenting with a couple of new concepts for @userlist.com’s message editor 🛠️ This results in a couple of weeks where it feels like we’re not getting anything meaningful done, but the building blocks we develop in that time are super useful down the road 🔥

We recently rolled out a few improvements to @userlist.com's Transactional Messages API. You can now customize almost every aspect of a message, including channel, topic, subject, body, sender, and (obviously) recipient. You can learn more in our docs: userlist.com/docs/develop...

The job of a programmer is to manage exactly two things: uncertainty and complexity. Code is sometimes an asset and sometimes a liability, but itself has no meaning outside the context of those two factors.

One thing I keep noticing: People love asking for integrations between @userlist.com and other tools, but almost always are very fuzzy about what that actually looks like 🧐 You'd think there's a specific use case or problem they're trying to solve, but it's rare to get specific answers to that 🤔

We improved @userlist.com's reporting capabilities a bit 🎉 You can now get account-wide reports, as well as drill downs by type (broadcast, workflow, ...) 🔍 We also made the aggregates smarter. Depending on what period you look at, you either get monthly, weekly, daily, or hourly stats 📈

I don't get to use pattern matching in Ruby very often, but I always like the end result when I do 😄

I just sold my old monitor with @benediktdeicke.com 's UserList sticker on it. "Sorry I forgot to take that sticker off" "Don't worry, I like it" 😂

The batch processing implementation of @userlist.com heavily relies on enumerators and whenever I come back to it, I fall in love with them all over again 😍

In case you missed it. @userlist.com comes with a library of workflow templates. No, it's not AI. When creating a new workflow, choose one of the templates. You'll get a populated workflow. As easy as apple pie 🍎

Our integrations now have eyes 👀 @benediktdeicke.com asked me for a design system to generate images for @userlist.com integration pages and alternatives. It needed to be simple, but quirky. Couple hours later, and new integration banners get a pair of eyes, randomly picked from 12 options.

Here's a fun bit of Ruby metaprogramming: get the name of the method that called the current method. `caller_locations(1, 1).first.label.split(" ").last` docs.ruby-lang.org/en/master/Ke... 🧵 1/3

Here's one quick example of what you can do with @userlist.com's new recurring trigger feature: Automated Quarterly Business Review invitations 📊 Extra nice when combined with our @savvycal.com integration to automatically stop reminders after people booked a call 🙌

Ember now builds on Vite by default (has worked for some time actually). I am truly amazed by the ability of Ember, even being old, less popular and less sponsored, to keep reinventing itself in a good way: providing strong backwards compatibility and a clear path forward without stagnating in time.

New feature at @userlist.com 💫 You can now start workflows on a calendar schedule (daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly) using a Recurring Trigger. For example, you can send a reminder to your Paying Customers segment every Friday (see illustration). Happy triggering 😜

Fun thing about playing the drums two times a week for the past 2 years: I'm actually improving… who would have thought? 🤣 Thanks @michaelkoper.com for pushing me to pick up the drums again back then 🤘

Super excited to finally ship this to everyone. While Userlist was able to store arrays since day one, using them in filters, conditions, or segments wasn't possible until now 🤩 The user interface even supports arrays of arrays, but not sure there's actually a good use case for that 🤣

Every so often you have a small script that needs to be run on your staging or production server, but committing and ...

Most batch/bulk APIs could be just a keep alive connection. Unless there’s some sort of wrapping transaction involved, I don’t see the point. You just end up building a new request/response protocol on top of HTTP. What am I missing?

I shut down my first SaaS business in July, but I'm still playing whac-a-mole with charges from various services I was using for it. With some of those, you think you cancelled, but they find reasons to keep charging 🫠

On my way to @microconf.com 🥱

Unreasonably excited about today's PostgreSQL 18 release because I can delete a bunch of Ruby code in favor of new built-in features in the database 🤩

After listening to about a dozen first-hand accounts, I’ve published what I know about the RubyGems takeover.

Made printable worksheets for our workshop at @microconf.com Europe next week. You can download the PDF and have fun on your own: userlist.com/downloads/si...

Ages ago, when I was still a student, I taught myself Ruby on Rails for my senior thesis and fell in love. Fifteen years later, and I’ve used Rails at every job I’ve ever held in the tech industry. Fifteen years, and I still love Rails! But there’s something rotten at its core, and we share a name.

When Values Eat Their Young: How Ideal-Driven Groups Drift into Their Own Shadow Good critique of open source organizations, lots to think about here. https://kennethreitz.org/essays/2025-08-25-when-values-eat-their-young

We're hiring! We're looking for an email-focused Marketing Manager to help people get the most out of Geocodio. If that sounds like someone you know, please send them our way! www.geocod.io/careers-emai...

The new @userlist.com is live on Product Hunt today 🚀🔥🔥 www.producthunt.com/products/use...

We launched a major overhaul of Userlist today 🥳 Among the obvious design changes, we also improved a bunch of things under the hood. They didn't make the cut for the blog post, but I'll briefly mention them here 🤓

If we inspired you to switch to Userlist right this second (haha, chuckle from sales), then book a demo and let’s discuss your implementation: userlist.com/demo

Tomorrow, September 9, we're launching a major redesign of @userlist.com. We tested a lot of logo options: from abstract forms, to kittens, dandelions, and propellers. But settled on the version designed by our CTO @benediktdeicke.com. How do you like it?

I wish there was a CSS thing like `overflow: hidden` but only for the layout and not for things like box shadows.

Sometimes the trick to optimizing database queries is simple: Don't do stupid stuff.

New addition to our Subscription Preferences feature ✍ Now you can subscribe people to individual topics (and unsubscribe them) via the API. So you can leverage @userlist.com preference page + display subscription options inside your product. Kudos @benediktdeicke.com and the dev team!

“A good programmer is not someone who writes a lot of code, but someone who avoids unnecessary code.”

The updated edition of Deploy Empathy is now out! 🎉 Slight problem, though: none of the nearly 100 reviews can be transferred over 😭 I *really* need people to buy the new version and write reviews. So I'm making it as cheap as I'm allowed to — $£€ 2.99 on Kindle www.amazon.com/Deploy-Empat...

Deployed a tiny little setting, at the bottom of a form of a niche feature two levels down from the main navigation. Didn’t tell anyone about it 🕵️‍♂️ Got a support request about it not even 12h later 🤣 Success? 🙃

SavvyCal is hiring! I'm looking for a remote full-stack developer to join the team. You'll work directly with me on interesting problems and make a meaningful impact on thousands of customers. Stack: Elixir, PostgreSQL, Inertia.js, React, TS, Tailwind CSS Apply: savvycal.com/jobs/full-st...

I wrote a comprehensive post dispelling many incorrect assumptions about Copyleft vs Permissive open source licenses. If you author/contribute to open source code, it's worth reading and understanding these nuances! shazow.net/posts/permis...

Exactly ten years ago today, I launched my first SaaS product. It had evolved for roughly ten more years before that 🤯 Last weekend, the last remaining customer migrated off of it and I'm planning to shut everything down in the next couple of days 🛑

It feels like I have to do something for Depfu. It has been one of the best free services I use. I can't understand they never asked me for any money! If you are like me and like to update all your dependencies each month, please checkout depfu.com It is a life saver (and a lot of time saver)

Our team at @userlist.com has seen every possible automation mistake; and we might've found a cure. Enter "Planning for the Worst": illustrated guide to building workflow mechanics → userlist.com/blog/buildin...

I thought the browser console was simple... I was wrong 🤯 It's actually packed with hidden features: 🖼️ Logging images ✨ AI explanations 🥹 Logging tables 🔧 Console utilities ($0, $_, ...) 🔎 Advanced filters 🔥 Live expressions New article below! www.debugbear.com/blog/chrome-...

Null is such an under-appreciated concept when dealing with data. When something doesn't have a value, please use `NULL` and not an empty string or something like that.

I know what you are thinking. You're thinking, "John, I miss your sweet sweet voice." Aw shucks. You're too kind. Well good news, I have a little something for you. My giant robots podcast episode just went live -- sweet voice and all. www.johnnunemaker.com/giant-robots/

I wish Benedikt Deicke and I lived in the same town, but we don't. So podcasts like this one will have to do! He was on the Ruby on Rails podcast to talk databases and userlist.com, his app for marketing automation (that we use on flippercloud.io). www.therubyonrailspodcast.com/537

Had a blast talking with Elise about getting into Rails, how @uibreakfast.com and I started Userlist, Arel, and more on The Ruby on Rails Podcast 🤩 www.therubyonrailspodcast.com/537

We're thrilled to add Make to our integrations catalog at @userlist.com 🔥 With Make you can: 💜 Create new Userlist users from Typeform responses, Calendly events, or new table rows 💜 Sync new registrants from webinar tools 💜 Keep subscribers in sync between Userlist and other email platforms