We Mailed 100K Stickers Around the World, Made a Million Mistakes Along the Way | Hacker News Reader

We Mailed 100K Stickers Around the World, Made a Million Mistakes Along the Way

dev.to

68 pointsrbanffy35 comments

I still don't know why companies insist on only accepting a specific address format. As they said, every country has its own format: some with the house number in front of the street, other afterwards; some with a province, others not; etc.

A simple text box is so much simpler (enforce things like max width, max lines) and relies on the customer inputting their info corresponding to their local postal delivery. In an international context this is the right way.

Edit: the only thing that must be localized in the sender's locale is the recipient's country (Spain instead of España when sending from an English speaking country). Every thing else must be in the recipient's locale.

Addresses are hard. Debugging harder. Have you ever tried debugging issues regarding addresses in foreign countries?

It sucks.

Relevant article: https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a...

At https://hackclub.com we send stickers to tons of students all around the world to help them promote their clubs.

One of the big problems we run into is that people often don't know how to properly write their address. They'll forget to give us their zip code. Or their state. Sometimes even their city. Does the state go before or after the zip code? How do you write the apartment number? It only gets more complex when they're in another country and we're sending from the US.

We probably run into these issues more often than most because we work with high schoolers that usually aren't regular users of physical mail, but we also run into these same problems more often than you'd expect when sending stickers to adults that donate.

Having form fields to prompt for everything needed fixes this problem.

One of the big problems we run into is that people often don't know how to properly write their address

OK, I think there is a limit to babysitting. If someone is a developer /runs a coding club and does not know how to write his address we run into basic darwinian natural selection.

How often did you send letters in high school?

I know that I thought zip code came before state until I started sending lots of mail.

Everyone knew his address when 10 yo. Not only you have to write it down a few times a year but it may have even been taught at school (France).

One of the reasons may be that we use addresses a lot, in other countries it may be that they are used only with actual shipping (?).

Everyone knows their street address, just not how to write their full address on an envelope for postal service.

I meant the full address, the way it should be written on a letter.

I don't where are you sending them but in my country, even though we have a zip code, it is not relevant. If you include it, great. If you don't, your package will still arrive. For this reason, nobody knows their zip code.

Interestingly enough we have the same system yet everyone knows their postal code. In fact all that's required for delivery is a postal code and house number. Including both the full address and the postal code allows for a nice amount of error-correction though.

"Initially we assumed this endeavor could be housed by a single Excel file...."

What?! Are you sure dev.to is a community of developers?

I can understand the part about character encoding (it has happen to all of us...) but seems like a lot of the issues they had could have been avoided by applying some software development skills...

Still, it is very nice that you decided to give away stickers for free, being on the recipient side is a nice feeling, I remember from the time Canonical shipped free Ubuntu disks!

Perhaps their top dev staff was busy doing website work or other tasks and marketing was in charge of the promotion?

Wouldn't be the first time I've seen marketing charge ahead with decisions leading to problems that could've been easily averted had they stopped and pinged a developer.

Founder here. Here are a couple comics that describe why it might have been the right choice to not try and software develop our way out of this one in the first place. https://xkcd.com/974/ https://xkcd.com/1319/

I have to agree with dev.to here. Never wrote an app for something a spreadsheet can easily accomplish.

With that said, it sounds like they ignored some warning sines that probably should have told them to drop the spreadsheet earlier.

I still don't know what dev.to does, only that they fail at sending out free stickers.

It's a web site with a fixed bar at the top. More than I need to know.

Founder here. https://dev.to a platform for the software dev community to talk about what they're hacking on and teach one another. It's a lot clearer on the home page. This post is just a story about stickers. :)

Not to say that every blog post needs to make you look great, but there were a LOT of code issues with this process. You should invest in a grumpy QA team.

Duly noted. I'm pretty proud of our team in general though. At the time there were two devs working on the whole app and I think we got a lot of good work done.

Just some feedback to say, I first tried to find out what dev.to is all about by going to your site and heading to the footer to click 'About' but it keeps loading more content :)

Basically Medium for developers.

Also, you can write your posts in Markdown, which is kinda nice, I think.

Some of those mistakes really shouldn't have happened, particularly because it was a community of developers and not just some big, old-school corporation. It's nice to see 95% of people eventually received their items but that could've been achieved with a lot less hassle!

On a side note, I hope the addressing experience was insightful and will be thought of better in future applications. It irks me to see so many web forms with the very American form of "City, State, ZIP" that are not designed to handle any exceptions to that rule, not because the company policy doesn't cater to an international audience, but because the developers didn't realise that addressing is very different across the world - and those people all get their mail just fine.

In a very small way, it always bothers me as a Brit (now living in the US) to see address information ask for (and even require) a ZIP code for int'l customers for two reasons:

1. ZIP is a US-only term. Sure, it's easy to figure out, but it's postal code everywhere else in the world. If an address form has a country field, the form should at least change the label accordingly. If not, even just writing "ZIP/postal code" makes at least some attempt to avoid US-centric terminology.

2. Some countries don't use a postal code system at all. I've seen services make this a required field, regardless of country.

Our form said Zip Number/Postal Code and State/Province and neither were required fields.

Sorry, this was not aimed at/related to dev.to - just an observation of address fields in general. Glad you were displaying geographically appropriate address info :)

I read the article, and discovered that they did not literally make 10 mistakes per sticker.

More like about 10 mistakes overall that resulted in a 5% failure rate for sticker delivery.

> So when we got inputs like Después de hogares crea, segunda entrada mano derecha, última casa verde (something about the last green house on the right according to Google Translate), we figured we had to validate these addresses.

Weird as it might seem, that's how addresses work in some places, if you make it invalid, you are excluding those users.

Thank you for sharing this. I think a lot of people here forget that there is no such thing as common sense, only hard earned experience. I thought you acted in true start-up fashion, learned a lot, and made your customers happy.

Not sure why you're getting so many negative comments in this thread but the Dev.to team is AMAZING.

Thank you for the stickers!

I took some for myself and gave a few to some friends in my coworking space at Galvanize and Green Desk in NYC.

Some of those things I don't understand how you can make when there are so many libraries out there, and are common things to look out for.

Other than that, cool idea and cool project

Because 20-something devs actually do suck at their jobs, and experience matters!

Slightly OT, but has anybody a recommendation on supplier of such printed stickers? I was thinking about sending some to my customers as well. Either US or Europe.

The supplier that dev.to used according to the OP is Sticker Mule.

https://www.stickermule.com/

I was really hoping they were going to mention kerning, because despite the letters appearing perfectly spaced, all I see is "DE V."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com