kpsychwave

Google Cloud, AWS, IBM all seem to offer a generic American English accent but with different voices. Given the huge variety of regional and ethnic accents/dialect in the US, why aren't there more options?

Looking for both technical and business insights.

I worked for 2 large companies that compiled (in back-end language for ex. ASP.net/JSP template) and sent transactional email messages synchronously in response to some action. Unsurprisingly, they lost messages when they exceeded their SMTP relay rate limit or when their email provider blocked their account for compliance reasons. In addition, any template changes were coupled to their application release cycle.

Obviously, these were not architected to scale. One of the companies fixed it by implementing an in-house priority-based queue, a separate template repository, micro-services for rendering/sending, etc... took serious effort.

I am curious:

a) Is this common? Even some open-source modern projects seem to send transactional messages on the fly without a retry/queuing mechanism?

b) What are the general best practices when it comes to queuing transactional messages and managing their templates?

Thanks!

For very large sites with thousands of dynamic pages, what are some ways to test the consistency of UI elements, layout, SEO conventions, etc... between builds and environments?

I recently stumbled on a very large WP project for which I've had to build a custom "diffing" tool between different environments for every page / article. I am curious to learn about how other large site owners solve this issue.