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I hope it works well too! Maybe I'll write a follow-up blog post in a few months and report back on our progress. In general, I think that marketers today shoul

I hope it works well too! Maybe I'll write a follow-up blog post in a few months and report back on our progress. In general, I think that marketers today should acquire some basic front-end knowledge and that knowing git and markdown is a good step towards getting there. Coding things like email templates and landing pages without the help of a designer or developer will be huge for us.

mattmanser 11y ago
You will never be able to code email templates and that just shows how clueless you are as to the rabbit hole your devs have got you in to. Email markup is so arcane and complex at the moment that one mistake by your non-technical team will mean hours of pain. I know you want to support your colleagues, but they have made a bad decision which will make your job less doing the things you are good at and more dealing with things that should never have been your problem.
- jc4p 11y ago
  This is really rude. I really want you to know that. I was going to tell you it _is_ possible to write e-mails in Markdown (use any Zurb template + make the message body editable via any Markdown --> HTML converter, then push it through a CSS inliner) but it seems more important to tell you that you are being very rude to someone who is very smart and one of my best friends.
  - mattmanser 11y ago
    What's rude about saying that he's vastly underestimating how complicated email templates are compared to, say modern HTML or simple markdown. He knows not what he says. If you'd ever created an email template you'd know it's really, really painful, full of hacks and takes practice and skill to work across a wide range of devices. For some marketing bod to claim the dev team are doing a great job because he'll soon be able to do emails himself just shows how little the devs have explained how hard this stuff actually is, and how limited markdown is. We've all seen this kind of nonsense before, devs making their own blogging engines out of duct tape and balsa wood. In the end, the fallout's never pretty. Also Disqus is bloody awful and you know it.
    - jc4p 11y ago
      First of all: Alexa is a she. Secondly: i've done a _lot_ of e-mails in the past. I've handcoded tables for e-mails, I've used Zurb's templates, I've used Zurb's Ink, I run my own SMTP server and used to run transactional e-mail for a popular start-up. You're really sticking onto arguing the same point, but if you read Alexa's post she's not necessarily saying e-mails are going to be made in Markdown. Alexa is not an idiot, she's ran marketing for many big companies in the past and knows how HTML and e-mails work. All she's saying is getting her team to learn more technology is a great thing. By the way, the rude part of your message was "how clueless you are as to the rabbit hole your devs have got you in to" -- You are automatically assuming you're much smarter than someone just because they're in marketing, which trust me, is not true.
    - Shog9 11y ago
      You realize this is the Stack Overflow blog, right? The site that hosts millions of posts written in Markdown every day? The one that's been sending templated emails written in Markdown for years? Separation of presentation and content, man. Learn it. You're right about Disqus though. Fortunately, there's Meta SO for real discussion.
    - alexa_scordato 11y ago
      Hey! I'm that marketing bod you're referring to. I wasn't trying to oversimplify the challenge of coding email templates. I was only trying to say that learning markdown is a great stepping stone for our team to get more technical skills under our belt. We have to crawl before we can walk. If everyone understands how to do things like create hyperlinks or knows how bold and italicize words without the help of a WYSIWYG panel, that's a good thing in my book. Maybe we can't code the most beautiful, responsive, complex emails in the world, but hey, everyone starts somewhere. I'm really lucky that I work at a company where we're encouraged to learn and where marketing is actually included in decisions like moving a blog from Wordpress to Jekyll. We had engineers who asked us to consider the extra work of learning Git and markdown. We welcomed the challenge and saw this as a unique opportunity to collaborate. I don't look at this decision as some hasty bait and switch move made by the engineering team. We were consulted as partners in the decision and I'm happy with where we landed. One of the writers on our team helped scrub the blog before we published it. At one point she even had more commits on the repo than any of the devs! I loved seeing that. I'm excited about the possibilities and would encourage you to be a bit more optimistic about our capacity to learn new skills.
- dang 11y ago
  > You will never be able to code email templates and that just shows how clueless you are Totally not ok on HN. Please follow the rules and comment civilly or not at all. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

mattmanser 11y ago

You will never be able to code email templates and that just shows how clueless you are as to the rabbit hole your devs have got you in to. Email markup is so arcane and complex at the moment that one mistake by your non-technical team will mean hours of pain. I know you want to support your colleagues, but they have made a bad decision which will make your job less doing the things you are good at and more dealing with things that should never have been your problem.

jc4p 11y ago
This is really rude. I really want you to know that. I was going to tell you it _is_ possible to write e-mails in Markdown (use any Zurb template + make the message body editable via any Markdown --> HTML converter, then push it through a CSS inliner) but it seems more important to tell you that you are being very rude to someone who is very smart and one of my best friends.
- mattmanser 11y ago
  What's rude about saying that he's vastly underestimating how complicated email templates are compared to, say modern HTML or simple markdown. He knows not what he says. If you'd ever created an email template you'd know it's really, really painful, full of hacks and takes practice and skill to work across a wide range of devices. For some marketing bod to claim the dev team are doing a great job because he'll soon be able to do emails himself just shows how little the devs have explained how hard this stuff actually is, and how limited markdown is. We've all seen this kind of nonsense before, devs making their own blogging engines out of duct tape and balsa wood. In the end, the fallout's never pretty. Also Disqus is bloody awful and you know it.
  - jc4p 11y ago
    First of all: Alexa is a she. Secondly: i've done a _lot_ of e-mails in the past. I've handcoded tables for e-mails, I've used Zurb's templates, I've used Zurb's Ink, I run my own SMTP server and used to run transactional e-mail for a popular start-up. You're really sticking onto arguing the same point, but if you read Alexa's post she's not necessarily saying e-mails are going to be made in Markdown. Alexa is not an idiot, she's ran marketing for many big companies in the past and knows how HTML and e-mails work. All she's saying is getting her team to learn more technology is a great thing. By the way, the rude part of your message was "how clueless you are as to the rabbit hole your devs have got you in to" -- You are automatically assuming you're much smarter than someone just because they're in marketing, which trust me, is not true.
  - Shog9 11y ago
    You realize this is the Stack Overflow blog, right? The site that hosts millions of posts written in Markdown every day? The one that's been sending templated emails written in Markdown for years? Separation of presentation and content, man. Learn it. You're right about Disqus though. Fortunately, there's Meta SO for real discussion.
  - alexa_scordato 11y ago
    Hey! I'm that marketing bod you're referring to. I wasn't trying to oversimplify the challenge of coding email templates. I was only trying to say that learning markdown is a great stepping stone for our team to get more technical skills under our belt. We have to crawl before we can walk. If everyone understands how to do things like create hyperlinks or knows how bold and italicize words without the help of a WYSIWYG panel, that's a good thing in my book. Maybe we can't code the most beautiful, responsive, complex emails in the world, but hey, everyone starts somewhere. I'm really lucky that I work at a company where we're encouraged to learn and where marketing is actually included in decisions like moving a blog from Wordpress to Jekyll. We had engineers who asked us to consider the extra work of learning Git and markdown. We welcomed the challenge and saw this as a unique opportunity to collaborate. I don't look at this decision as some hasty bait and switch move made by the engineering team. We were consulted as partners in the decision and I'm happy with where we landed. One of the writers on our team helped scrub the blog before we published it. At one point she even had more commits on the repo than any of the devs! I loved seeing that. I'm excited about the possibilities and would encourage you to be a bit more optimistic about our capacity to learn new skills.
dang 11y ago
> You will never be able to code email templates and that just shows how clueless you are Totally not ok on HN. Please follow the rules and comment civilly or not at all. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html