
We Mailed 100K Stickers Around the World, Made a Million Mistakes Along the Way - rbanffy
https://dev.to/thepracticaldev/sending-100-thousand-stickers
======
F_r_k
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.

~~~
zachlatta
At [https://hackclub.com](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.

~~~
BrandoElFollito
_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.

~~~
zachlatta
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.

~~~
BrandoElFollito
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 (?).

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

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

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otto_ortega
"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!

~~~
bhalp1
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/974/)
[https://xkcd.com/1319/](https://xkcd.com/1319/)

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

~~~
bhalp1
Founder here. [https://dev.to](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. :)

~~~
Danihan
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.

~~~
bhalp1
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.

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darshandsoni
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.

~~~
jads
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.

~~~
bhalp1
Our form said Zip Number/Postal Code and State/Province and neither were
required fields.

~~~
jads
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 :)

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logfromblammo
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.

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cdpolyme
> 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.

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lowbloodsugar
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.

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Ryel
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.

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celim307
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

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

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sebst
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.

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

[https://www.stickermule.com/](https://www.stickermule.com/)

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

