June 2021 Summaries

The Courier notification system offers a lightweight solution using React that has a global state and runs independently in the background. This allows teams to render the components regardless of their tech stack. The components are built using custom Courier components inspired by Web Components, which enable a modular setup for a custom solution that can be implemented anywhere with any specific user interface or front-end library or framework. The initial setup is straightforward, and additional configuration options allow for deferring initialization and mapping configuration for each component. The SDK is exposed on window.courier and is loaded asynchronously. After initialization, the Courier components render into a portal, preserving global state, and can be dynamically imported using React Suspense to ensure small bundle size.

The 2021 Bitcamp Hackathon was sponsored by Courier, a platform used for sending notifications. Matt Graber, a new graduate, created a game called Package Person using Courier as part of his development tools. The game's objective is to deliver packages while avoiding dogs, and it uses Unity as its game engine. Matt developed the game alone after gaining experience with Unity through his time in the UMD AR Club. He used Courier to send notifications to players, including notifications when they reach the leaderboard or are beaten by another player. Despite some challenges, such as not having a Courier SDK for C#, Matt found the process manageable and was able to create a game that produced interesting results. With more time, he would like to add a mobile app feature to the game, which would keep track of scores across all installations and send push notifications to players.

Courier encountered an issue with email subjects being truncated or rendered incorrectly in Microsoft Outlook due to the default character limit of 127 characters, which restricts support for non-UTF-8 characters. To solve this problem, they discovered that encoding email subjects in base64 and using a specific format (RFC 1342) allows the server to decode and render them correctly. However, they also encountered limitations with some email providers and had to implement a recursive encoding process to ensure compatibility. The solution involved checking for Microsoft Outlook as the culprit behind the issue, rather than assuming it was a local configuration problem, and using online tools such as UTF-8 email subject encoders to test and refine their approach.

This article discusses the benefits of using serverless technologies, particularly S3 and Lambda, for building software products in startups. The author shares their personal experience joining a startup called Courier, where they adopted serverless to accelerate development speed while scaling efficiently. They highlight how serverless frameworks like AWS Serverless Framework enabled them to build powerful send pipelines and automate tasks with minimal infrastructure management. Additionally, the article explores various use cases for S3, such as storing large item attributes in DynamoDB and using the Web Service to S3 pattern for managing time-consuming processing. The author also discusses a performance issue they encountered with a Lambda function and how reconfiguring it using serverless features resolved the problem. Finally, the article showcases an example of automating job processing with SQS and Lambda, demonstrating the potential of serverless to enable rapid development and deployment of complex systems. Overall, the article presents a compelling case for adopting serverless technologies in startups to achieve faster time-to-market and greater scalability.