Notes on Buttondown.com

We spent $85,000 for buttondown.com in April; this became the finest capital expenditure I’ve ever made, and despite the truth that it became coming from cash circulation generated by Buttondown rather than my have checking yarn it became by tough estimation the largest non-dwelling discover I’ve ever made.

As of August, we’re formally migrated over from buttondown.electronic mail to buttondown.com. I’m certain I will enact a extra company blog post on the transition in the long experience, but for now I want to jot down some assignment notes:

• The total assignment became made mighty extra painful attributable to Buttondown’s structure, which is a hybrid of Vercel/Next (for the marketing save and docs save) and Django/Heroku (for the core app) managed by a HAProxy load balancer to route requests. We ended up the utilization of hurl as a take a look at harness around HAProxy, something we potentially will accept as true with to silent accept as true with performed three years previously.
• I went in staring at for SEO traffic to be hit as Google renegotiates legions of canonical URLs; it hasn’t, a minimal of up to now. As a change, all the pieces seems to accept as true with upright bumped pretty healthily.
• I expected extra production factors to approach motivate up than with out a doubt did. I credit rating this to a sexy streak scope: the aim became “emigrate all net traffic to .com”, which meant that a) we did now not must re-scheme any paths and b) we did now not must anxiety about mapping SMTP traffic (which silent runs through buttondown.electronic mail).
• The toughest phase of the assignment became the stuff it’s likely you’ll perchance presumably no longer grep for. URLs on assorted sites, OAuth redirect URLs, that form of facet.
• Starting with remoted domains (the documentation save, the demo save) that weren’t tied to the aforementioned HAProxy load balancer gave me some ideal early self assurance that the migration would be light.

Overall: very chuffed with the plot in which it change into out. I would divulge the mission roughly as “three months of fretting/planning, one week of grepping, and one week of fallout.”

Turned into it fee it? Sure, I deem so. Most theoretical capital expenditures Buttondown can function at the moment accept as true with a non-trivial ongoing fee associated with them (steal one more newsletter company or philosophize vertical and now you will want to experience it on a day-to-day foundation; enact a substantial marketing plot-out and you will want to connect an eye fixed on it; and so forth.) — this became a pointy but mounted fee, and it’s something that I knew I wanted to enact in the fullness of time. (And, most importantly, of us quit relating to Buttondown as “Buttondown Electronic mail”, a inside of most pet peeve of mine.)