If you’ve ever wondered how you can make building emails fun again, you’ll probably want to hear from Lee Munroe. Mailgun, the company Lee works for, offers APIs that enable developers to send, receive and track emails. As a product designer, Lee is responsible for the user facing properties and customer experience. “I’ll design and build out new features and interfaces, and work with our engineers to get them shipped,” said Lee.

Lee will be talking about How to Make Your Email Design Workflow Fun Again at Web Unleashed this year, so we caught up with him to get to know him a bit better and find out why his presentation is not to be missed.

What’s your favorite part?

I like being involved in the full life cycle of a product. Being at Mailgun, which is a small team within Rackspace, it gives me the opportunity to wear many hats and have a hand in research, UX design, front-end, product and marketing.

Tell us a bit about a project you're proud of.

When I wanted to learn Node.js I put together a little side project called Codeshare.io. A simple website that enables developers to share code real-time. Great for troubleshooting code, or even phone screening developers. It gets quite a lot of usage today.

What’s the best career advice you were ever given?

While at University, our lecturer Christopher Murphy (@fehler) made us visualize what we would be doing in 5 years by sketching it out. Five years later a lot of the sketches had come true. By visualizing it helped me work backwards to figure out what my milestones were along the way.

Why should people come to your session at Web Unleashed?

If you’ve ever had to build an HTML email you’ll know the process is a beast. It is still something that is in the dark ages, with tables and inline CSS, and with over 30 email clients to support it is hard to get it right. I’ll talk about using modern day front-end development tools to make the process of building HTML emails enjoyable and bullet proof.

One fun question: coffee or tea?

Coffee. Irish :-)

You can find Lee on Twitter @LeeMunroe and on GitHub.