Lettermint Integration for Django

Last week, I needed an email sending service for my energy label search tool: energielabelcheck.com.

I decided to pick lettermint.co. One of the co-founders, Bjarn, was part of the same team during my assignment at Essent.
Also, I love the fact that it is made and hosted in Europe.

In this era of using AI tools for development I decided to take a slightly different route to integrate the service by creating a package which integrates Lettermint with Django.

Some of my reasons for this included:

• While AI can perfectly come up with the required code to integrate an application with a service like Lettermint, a package provides the advantage that the integration can be used and improved by multiple parties. This results in a more proven outcome.

• Putting integration code like this in a package ensures separation of concerns. The Django framework has good support for integrating different mail backends.

I let AI draft the initial integration. It was very good for this because it happens to be very capable of analyzing the documentation of the service.

I used my opinions and hands-on experience to guide it towards a more minimal implementation which matches my style of software.

django-lettermint is now available on PyPI

The first emails are sent, and it works flawlessly so far.

After releasing, I discovered that somebody else made a far more elaborate version of this integration and released it on PyPI too…

I inspected the other package, and I noticed that it was being developed with different values. Guess we all like our software to be different. ☺️

That’s why I like the process of choosing the right third-party packages for my projects. It connects me to like-minded people, while the process requires me to first take an open view and consider different approaches.

Guess no — Shall I write this integration for you? — can beat that experience.