May 2021 Summaries

During a virtual hackathon, the company Courier sponsored an event called Hackabull, which was hosted by the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers at the University of South Florida in March 2021. This was the first time Courier had sponsored a hackathon and it provided a great opportunity to engage with developers directly. The author of the blog post attended the event and guided participants through setting up an application that would accept Twitch EventSub webhooks, send notifications to Discord users using Courier, and create a recipient with a Discord profile. The participants created their own applications using a Glitch app as a starting point and were able to accomplish this in just one hour. By the end of the workshop, all attendees had a working application that explored the features of Courier. The Speed Friender team, which consisted of two computer science majors, was inspired by the event and went on to develop their own Discord bot using Courier's capabilities.

Aydrian Howard, Head of Developer Experience at Courier, brings together a team of engineers on "Courier live" every month to discuss recent updates and upcoming features. In this episode, Aydrian and Nate Munger, Head of Customer Success, cover the new in-app notifications API, inbox component (now in beta), and automations API (now Generally Available). They also introduce the preferences component, which allows users to customize their notification experience. Additionally, Chris Gradwohl from the Automations team discusses the latest updates to the Automations API, including a new fetch-data step that enables fetching data from external APIs and merging it with other data sources. Finally, Nate Munger announces that Outbound Webhooks are now in beta, allowing users to listen for message status updates without polling the messages API.

When building a ridesharing app, the developers learned that focusing on customer value and outsourcing non-differentiated features such as authentication, notifications, and payments can help speed up development. They used Auth0 for authentication and authorization, Courier for automating notifications across multiple channels, and Sendgrid for sending emails. By integrating Auth0 with Courier's Invoke Automation API, the developers could automatically create user profiles and send welcome messages without writing additional code in their application. This integration allowed them to focus on building the core product and provided a scalable solution for handling user onboarding workflows.