August 2022 Summaries

Developers often choose Ably for building chat applications or incorporating chat functionality in their products. The platform's serverless WebSockets feature allows developers to focus on delivering the best possible core user experience. Ably has introduced a new Message Interactions feature, making it easier and faster for devs to add additional functionality in 1:1, group, or large-scale chat apps built on Ably. This includes interacting with sent messages by 'liking', replying, quoting, or adding emoji reactions. The basic features required are Channels and Message Interactions. Other chat functionalities that can be built using Ably include emoji reactions, message updating and deleting, read receipts and unread counts, quoting/replying to a message, message threads, media previews, live example of adding emoji reactions, typing indicators, Avatar Stack for showing active users in chat rooms, channel listing, contact activity, popular channels, etc. HubSpot chose Ably for their entire customer support due to its scalability and reliability.

In this article, the author demonstrates how they used GitHub webhooks and Netlify serverless functions along with a simple Svelte web app to create an interactive visualizer tool that displays real-time work of their entire engineering organization. The tool was inspired by Gource, which is a software version control visualization tool but works locally and doesn't show data in real-time. The new visualizer tool depicts code committed to a GitHub repository or organization as they happen. The author also explains how the UI can be built with Svelte, how to make a force directed graph with VisJS, and how to convert GitHub webhooks data into JS objects. They also discuss potential extensions of this project and provide useful resources for further reading.

In this post, the author compares two cloud pubsub services, Azure Web PubSub and Ably, for developing a multi-user pixelart drawing application. The comparison covers features such as ease of use of SDKs/APIs, amount of code needed to add realtime capabilities, authentication, creating client-side connections, presence, publishing messages, and subscribing to messages. Both services offer similar pubsub feature sets, but Ably provides additional features like presence, message history, and transport selection. The author finds the Ably client-side API easier to develop with than the native WebSockets API and encourages readers to try out the collaborative pixel drawing application using either service.

In-person events are crucial for remote teams as they foster stronger bonds and align team members over shared goals. Ably, a remote-first company, holds bi-annual summits that combine team bonding activities, workshops, and sessions with fun activities to create memorable experiences. Planning such an event involves focusing on the purpose, balancing work and play, considering audience needs, and seeking feedback for improvement. Staying connected through virtual initiatives and face-to-face events helps maintain a strong company culture in a remote setting.