August 2020 Summaries

During our August 19th Courier Live, Tony Nguyen from the engineering team joined me to discuss my favorite Courier feature, the logs, providing a high-level overview and diving into details of each timeline event in the Courier Application. We also explored how to retrieve log information using the Messages API, listing messages, fetching a single message, getting message history, and understanding the lifecycle of a notification. The Courier API allows for programmatically retrieving log details, with options including GET /messages for listing messages and GET /messages/{message_id} for fetching specific messages. Additionally, the Messages API can be used to retrieve message events and history using GET /messages/{message_id}/history.

I worked at two companies, one being small startup where I had to set up my environment and push working code into production by the end of day on my first week, which was a success. In contrast, my first week at Courier coincided with Covid-19 lockdowns in San Francisco and I had borrowed an Apple Air laptop to set up my environment, which also worked out well despite some challenges. Both companies promoted engagement and focus through setting up a body of work that could fit in the remaining hours, having a demo day every week, choosing a tech stack that was easy to learn, and being remote or in-office first setups, with the latter helping me feel more connected to the company during my early days.

Danny Douglass from our engineering team joined me for our August 12th Courier Live, where we discussed a No Code approach to sending notifications using Courier as a Segment destination. We successfully set up and sent our first notification in under 30 minutes. The Courier Destination is currently in beta and can be accessed by existing Segment users who want to quickly send notifications across multiple channels.

Embedding widgets in a DOM that you don't own can be frustrating due to style collisions, and traditional solutions like iFrames have limitations such as size issues, communication problems, and inability to customize styles. A more modern approach is to use the Shadow DOM, an API for DOM encapsulation that allows creating a hidden DOM tree attached to elements in the regular DOM tree, enabling isolation of styles and improving composite user interfaces. The Shadow DOM can be used with CSS specificity, React, or other libraries, making it easier to create beautiful and customizable user experiences without the need for iFrames or explicit CSS tweaking.

During our August 5th Courier Live, I was joined by Riley Napier, one of our Sr. Software Engineers, who updated the Courier Node.js SDK to support our new Idempotent Requests feature. This allows for safely retrying requests without accidentally performing the same operation twice, ensuring that notifications or messages are not sent multiple times if a network connection error occurs. With this update, developers can now provide an idempotencyKey value in an optional config object for each function that sends a POST request, enabling them to handle changing TypeScript and test their changes more effectively. The updated SDK provides a unique key in the Idempotency-Key header, allowing requests with the same key to be idempotent as long as that key exists in our system.

Choosing an event-driven architecture (EDA) for the backend of an application can significantly impact its scalability, maintainability, and overall success. Courier, a company that helps customers quickly design notifications and deliver them through their send endpoint, chose EDA backed by AWS as its backend architecture to ensure it could scale with various vectors such as quality, maintainability, ease of adding new features, and variable vs fixed infrastructure costs. By designing software around events, EDA promotes a highly decoupled system environment, allowing for independent work on code that reacts to events. This choice has brought numerous benefits, including focused functions, easy addition of observers, and monitoring capabilities with DataDog. However, it also presents challenges such as increased complexity in documentation and diagramming, difficulties in introducing changes to the event without affecting other handlers, and constraints when designing functions within the AWS stack. Despite these struggles, Courier believes its choice of EDA outweighs the cons, and it has matched its business needs for both short-term and long-term growth.

During a recent Courier Live, Nate Munger from the Head of Customer Success discussed the new Brands feature set with me. We walked through creating and sending an email using this feature. The example used Python to create a brand named "Foxhub" which included colors, email settings, and snippets for notifications. The script was then run on the Courier API, successfully creating the brand. The event also featured a live stream of the code being written in real-time, allowing viewers to see how the brand was created and how it could be used with the Python SDK.

We will be streaming Courier Live every Wednesday at noon Pacific, where we discuss and demonstrate topics around what's happening in the notification space. Our first stream was recorded on March 11th and showcased adding email and text notifications to a Glitch application using Courier. The application, Pigeon Weather, was updated to include sending functionality, modified user CRUD routes, and configured Courier's notification with email and SMS channels. A recording of the live stream is available on our YouTube channel, and viewers can remix the app using their own Free Courier Account or check out the GitHub Repository for a starter app.

Notifications are a critical channel for user engagement, growth, and retention, especially in fintech companies where timely alerts can have significant repercussions. Executives from mid-market product orgs emphasized the need for robust notification systems that allow users to control their preferences, with features such as cross-compatible templating across multiple channels like SMS, email, and Slack. However, building such a system requires significant engineering hours and investment, often exceeding $1 million, which is why many companies are now seeking alternatives like Courier, an easy-to-use platform for managing notifications over any channel.