This was an off-hours work project for me. I am not a developer by any means necessary but I made it a mission to learn at least enough code to be able to read and understand the work my developers create.

We're mostly a Ruby on Rails shop, but I come from a very light PHP background and wanted to pick it up again just as a starting point. After a few weeks of looking at CakePHP (and learning MVC!) I ended up with this: a CakePHP component that allows you to send emails through PostageApp. (http://postageapp.com)

https://github.com/postageapp/postageapp-cakephp

The process was pretty simple: take a look at EmailComponent, the built-in email sender for CakePHP and strip out everything that was unnecessary, create a hash that gets encoded into JSON and passed off into the PostageApp API, and test the crap out of it.

It was a great learning experience, and I am now looking to other platforms (Right now, Node.JS and Backbone.JS) to build more plugins for and learn a lot more.

Would love some feedback and/or code critique! Thanks HN!

(Full Disclosure: I'm the Product Manager for PostageApp!)