One of the things we really enjoy in Threadless Tech is Minecraft. You all remember our Minecraft Challenge, right? It was one of the best we had. Wouldn't it be great if we could combine Threadless and Minecraft in more ways? We thought so, and so we did!

One of the new technology initiatives we've been working on is our Threadbare API. Written in Python and running on the Twisted server, it lets us exchange data between various apps or features on the site asynchronously, meaning things can run in the background without you having to wait for them and they'll update the site when they're done. So that makes Threadbare perfect for exchanging data between our application database and our Minecraft database. For the game, we have a Bukkit server running with Essentials, LWC, Towny and some other things. You start off in the Player group when you first join, but if you go to your Threadless profile and add your Minecraft name under Link Other Accounts, Threadbare will tell the game server and you'll get promoted to the Member group. This lets you be able to teleport, set a home warp and gives you access to the MembersOnly kit. There's other in-game stuff you can unlock by doing things on threadless.com too!

You're all invited to come play with us if you'd like to check it out. Just start up Minecraft and connect to our server at minecraft.threadless.com.

Threadless Techies have the greatest job in the world -- taking all of the fun ideas from the company (and the community), and translating them into working applications. We have a lot of exciting things in the works, and we want to share them with you as they come online.

You probably know that you can now buy iPhone cases for many of our designs, and that any new or reprinted designs will have a case available. You might not know that these are handled very differently than our traditional catalog offerings. Rather than creating them ahead of time and warehousing the items, we’re creating the cases “on demand”.

For us, “on demand” means we don’t print the case until it’s been ordered. It’s great because we can offer a larger selection, and launch new designs faster. But it required a lot of changes to our code base.

As a back-end developer, I’m focused on getting the data into the right place, in the right format. This project required a small team of developers, working with departments across the company, to pull off.

The first step was setting up the site to display and sell the items. It sounds simple, but so much of our logic depends on an item being in-stock, we had to rethink everything from the catalog pages to the shipments. In the end, these items have the same properties as our warehoused products, but with a special on-demand flag. Having to not add another data model was a big win for stability and maintenance.

After the order is placed, it takes a separate route from the normal orders. A special process detects it, prepares the artwork, and starts the printing. This is all happening on our new Django platform, which we’re excited about, and will be talking about quite a bit. When the case is finished printing, it’s returned to the normal flow for packing and shipping.

What this has given us, besides the opportunity to sell great-looking cases, is the flexibility to be more creative with our processes. As we come up with new products, and new ways to create them, we can use this foundation to bring them to the community.

So that’s our latest launch, we’ll be updating this blog regularly. We love hearing from fellow techies, and anyone else that wants to chat. We’ll do our best to answer any questions.

The kind of question that's only born in the late hours of a coding binge: Does Siricha make everything taste better?

After a quick run to Jewel for supplies, the order of the challengers was set: When the random number is 42, you know it's going to be a good day.

First up was Scott, who chose mango, which seemed like a safe choice: "Absolutely foul" And a terrible start to our plan.

Dan was next. not only making a brave choice with applesauce, but saturating it: "It has the same effect as Cinnamon. I'd eat it again, but with less Siricha"

Next was Shaun, with a chocolate-covered, creme filled donut: "This is so good!"

Easily the best food of the challenge, Shaun went back for seconds:

Betsy crashed our tech-only party to try the mango/Siricha combo: "Not bad."

I was next, and I had been eyeing the yogurt with Oreo: It tasted like an Indian dessert. Really, really good.

Down to the dregs, Isaac went for the generic frosted wheat cereal: It's like I'm making sushi

"Crunchy with a curious mix of satisfying sweetness and arousing spice."

And finally, fittingly, our newest techie, AJ, went last, stuck with the dreaded "Gel" cup: "Are you sure you took the plastic film off?"

"No. No. No."

The takeaway? Siricha tastes good on anything that doesn't contain fruit. Tell your friends.

We're looking for food items for the next challenge. Drop some ideas in the comments.

Hi All, just wanted to share some pictures from the first few days of Krazytown.

We're working in the big Airstream

It has everything we need...workspace

A conference room (for the dozens of meetings we love to have)

and code (not pictured). Lots and lots of code.

2011 is a big year for the technerds, we're experimenting with a lot of new stuff, trying new ways of working, and filling up whiteboards faster than you can spit.

Before we get to 2011, let's dive back into 2010, and talk about a few process things we did that ended up playing heavily into how we decided what to work on this year. In the beginning of 2010, we started using a project tracking tool called Pivotal Tracker. Pivotal is an agile project management tool that's pretty low maintenance. It's easy to add a description of a piece of functionality you want on the site (typically called stories), estimate the effort you think it will take to complete (story points), and track progress against tasks associated with the story. As you roll along with the tool, it starts to figure out how much you can get done in a given period of time (your velocity).

The first step in optimizing anything is to measure it, which is what we did with Pivotal. As we gathered more and more data, it became clear that we were spending a lot of our time maintaining the underlying framework of our sites, rather than adding new functionality to them. Our velocity was pretty consistent, but it never felt like we were accomplishing the big things we wanted to accomplish. As an example, 2010 was supposed to be about spending time on the community, but in reality we spent a lot more time maintaining the commerce side of Threadless than we did adding new features that directly impacted our artists. That sucked. When we look back on 2010, it's one of our biggest dissapointments.

So, at the end of 2010, we started thinking about ways that we could turn that all around. We spent a lot of time with markers and whiteboards figuring out the kind of environment we wanted to work on, but needed a catalyst to start to gel everything together. Enter Cpt. skaw with his brilliant idea to use our wildly successful design model to help aid charitable organizations, Threadless Causes. It seemed like a great way to prove out new ideas we had for how to build our toys.

Causes was built entirely in Python on the Django web framework, and deployed on smaller cloud servers. Once the new stack was proven, we spent time converting chunks of core Threadless functionality to the same stack. We focused on the elements that crossed page boundries, like sessions, the cart status, and headers and footers. Which leads us to crazytown. Crazytown is a special two week project that kicks off this coming Monday (4/11/11). Tech is going to hide out in the Airstream trailers in the atrium, and pound through as many pages as we can, converting each to the new stack. As we do so, we'll roll them out to the new cloud servers.

What does that all mean to you all? Think of it as an upgrade to the buildings wiring, or plumbing. Maybe you'll notice more water pressure, or less brown outs, maybe things will be a bit tighter, but chances are - you won't see major changes. However, in the following weeks, you'll see lots of new changes, because the wiring will make it easier for us to deploy shiny new stuff. We're pretty excited for the changes, and especially excited for crazytown...we'll keep you all updated as things start to roll out.

Hey all!

Every month, Alternative Press hosts a new set of contests pertaining to different bands and companies within the music industry (as much as I hate that term).

Threadless, No Sleep Records and The Felix Culpa have teamed up this month to bring you the chance to win a boatload of Threadless stuff, as well as the entire back-catalogue for The Felix Culpa! =D

If you want to enter to win the free stuff (there will be 5 winners, spanning 3 tiers), simply head on over to http://www.altpress.com/contests/view/win_a_closet_full_of_threadless/ and do it! It's seriously that simple, I promise. =]

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask away. Either way, have fun and good luck!

Cheers! - Tristan -

I'm on month two of being a SystemsEngineer at Threadless, and its more fun than you even think it is. It is amazing. One of the reasons is that we all play.

Other groups(creative, marketing, customer service, etc) have a different way of playing than some of us in tech do. They rally up down in the atrium for some foozball, heated ping pong battles, or kick it on one of the many skateboards around. Up in tech, we fire up steam and go kill each other in a multitude of video games. Our favorite right now is Battlefield BadCompany 2 (Thanks, EA, btw).

This weekend, our love of video games is going to a worthy cause. A few Threadless techheads are flying down to Texas to play video games for charity in the 3rd annual Extra Life video game marathon.

We didn't get into the mix until quite late, so we are mostly playing to raise awareness and promote the event. We'll be bringing a ton of shirts as giveaways to thank the people who are making this happen. If you want, you can throw in a couple bucks and motivate us to kill more guys in Battlefield BC2 here. :D

Playing games to help children? That rules.