September 2020 Summaries

The video showcases the Lists feature of the Courier Node.js Library, a tool for building delightful product notifications. The Lists API allows developers to create and manage lists, subscribe recipients to these lists, send notifications to specific lists or using patterns, and view list sends in the Courier Logs. The code examples demonstrate how to create a list, subscribe a recipient to a list, send a notification to a list, and use patterns to target multiple lists. The Lists feature is useful for managing product updates, live events, and other types of notifications, and can be used to gather and de-duping recipients that satisfy specific patterns.

I attended Twilio's annual developer conference, Signal, as a boot-strapped startup to gauge its usefulness and potentially find business opportunities. I bypassed security by wearing a fake lanyard and feigning a business conversation with my friend, then walked into the venue, collected business cards, but didn't find any promising leads until I stumbled upon a prominent Silicon Valley competitor's booth. There, I met their CEO who was looking for an on-prem solution to cater to his Fortune 500 clients, which turned out to be our area of expertise, and we eventually developed a major partnership that justified the cost of attending the event.

Begin is an AWS development tool that helps developers ship web apps and APIs on the platform with ease, as demonstrated by Paul Chin, Jr., who updated his 5-year-old Ghostbusters site to a functional FASTstack application using Begin. To handle form submissions, Paul used Courier, a notification service provided by Begin, which allows for easy setup of contact forms, serverless functions, and integration with Slack applications. The process involves creating a new Begin application, adding an HTML form, handling the submit using a serverless function, setting up a new Slack application to send direct messages, and connecting it to the Courier notification. This stream showcases what's possible when building apps with Begin and Courier, making it easier to create on AWS.

Courier is a notification management platform that aims to simplify the process of managing multiple notification providers by introducing universal statuses. These statuses are mapped into clear and universal definitions, making it easy for users to understand and manage their notifications across different providers. Courier provides a single source of truth for tracking messages, allowing users to easily drill down into provider-specific details while maintaining consistency in their view. The platform supports linear status transitions, ensuring that the next status is always predictable. Courier tracks engagement metrics such as email opens and click-through rates, providing data-driven insights for data-driven email notifications. Users can access their statuses through the Event Logs, which offer a column view of statuses with filtering capabilities. Additionally, Courier provides REST API endpoints for accessing data at scale. The platform continues to evolve with updates on logging infrastructure, including support for webhooks and advanced analytics.

As a follow-up to the Courier Live where Troy and I built the Pigeon Weather App, I went back and added support for sending notifications as direct messages in Slack. Adding this feature required only adding the Slack provider, designing the message, and updating our Glitch App to accept Slack profile information. To send a notification to a Slack channel or as a direct message to a Slack user, you can use your existing Slack App or create a new one, granting it the proper permissions via OAuth scopes. When sending to a Slack public or private channel, your app must be granted the chat:write scope and be a member of the channel being sent to. To send a direct message, your app needs the im:write scope and can use various options such as a Slack Button, user's Slack user_id, or email associated with the user's account. Courier makes it easy to send notifications to a Slack channel or as a direct message to a Slack user, providing a single platform for designing, orchestrating, and routing notifications over multiple channels.

Courier has raised a $10.1M Series A funding round led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from numerous top investors including Matrix Partners, Twilio, Slack, Y Combinator, and many great angel investors. The company's seed round was previously unannounced at $2.3M, raising the total funding to date to over $12.4M. Courier aims to build what it believes will be the sensible default for every software product's communication infrastructure, with plans to invest in new features such as delayed and scheduled messages, message batching, and UI libraries for notification centers and in-app notifications. The company has grown from a team of four to 11 engineers and is now hiring for more roles. With its new funding round, Courier will focus on scaling its team to pursue this vision and make it a reality.

Courier is an IoT development platform that allows developers to integrate their devices with other services, enabling real-time interactions between the physical and digital worlds. In a recent project, Riley Napier from the engineering team used the Courier Webhook Provider to send notifications to a BlinkStick Square device, demonstrating dynamic destination configuration and accepting POST requests. The notification triggered an event on a client-side Node.js application, which handled the alert using Socket.io and played a sound through the computer's speakers, transitioning the device through colors of the rainbow. This exercise showcased the potential of Courier in IoT development and encouraged viewers to explore more possibilities with their own projects.

We built a Slack Slash Command using Glitch ExpressJS and Courier to display estimated departure times for BART stations, leveraging Jsonnet's powerful data templating capabilities to dynamically generate Block Kit elements. The command uses variables, functions, and list comprehensions to render the desired output, including images and text with specific colors and directions. We showcased the completed project in a live video demonstration and invited viewers to remix our Glitch app and create their own Slack Slash Command.

Yehong Zhu, the founder and CEO of Zette, shares her experience as a product manager at Twitter and Forbes, highlighting 9 ironies that she encountered in the role, including the harsh reality that product management is lonely, takes time to learn, and rarely has clear-cut outcomes. She also notes that true originality in product is rare, cutting corners is common, and PMs are often expected to be happy and cheerful despite facing challenging situations.