From the start we wanted to make sure that Beanstalk is not just a place to host your version control repositories, but also a tool to improve communication in your development process. Features like commit notifications and the ability to comment on changesets are a big part of helping keep a team up to date and allowing discussion around recent code to review and improve.

It’s no surprise then that commit notifications in Beanstalk are one of our most used team features.

Unbreaking our own rule: “no noreply”

Beanstalk allows for quick and easy commenting either on an entire changeset, on a specific file, or even on a specific line. Unfortunately, our commit notifications only gave you a link to the page where a comment could be left. If you replied to the commit notification email, you got an ugly “noreply@beanstalkapp.com”, breaking one of our own cardinal rules.

Postmark Inbound helps us make code review easy

Another goal of Beanstalk is to help people improve their development workflow. Code review is known to be a valuable practice in software development.

Unfortunately, code review is often skipped due to all of the extra effort that goes into it. We realized that if we could make code review as easy as replying to an email, more people would participate.

Thanks to Postmark Inbound, Beanstalk users can now reply to commit notifications and we’ll automatically process the reply and add it as a comment to the changeset replied to.

Built for us, built for you

Postmark transactional email delivery was built because we knew the challenges of maintaining email delivery for web apps first hand. Similarly, we built Postmark Inbound because processing inbound email should be as effortless as sending email from a web app.

Since Wildbit uses and relies on its own products every day, we are able to find problems and deliver solutions that benefit everyone. Postmark now solves one more of our needs as a software company, and we’re happy knowing that solution will benefit our customers as well.

← Inbound

Written by Alex Hillman,
team member of Wildbit, the makers of the Beanstalk hosted version control.