March 2024 Summaries

Knock, a company providing APIs for integrating notifications into products, faced performance bottlenecks in their Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL database, primarily due to expensive transactions being lumped under a single COMMIT statement in Amazon RDS Performance Insights. To address this, Knock modified their Elixir PostgreSQL driver, Postgrex, to prepend SQL comments to COMMIT statements, thereby allowing the Performance Insights to enumerate individual transactions. This approach enabled Knock to identify and prioritize which transactions were causing the most database load, leading them to batch transaction creations and consider migrating some data to other datastores. The company has observed no negative performance impact from this modification, has made it a permanent feature, and is considering discussing this change with Ecto maintainers for potential upstream integration. Knock's experience with SQL comment injection to gain granular insights into transaction performance could benefit others facing similar database challenges.

Integrating Slack into an application can be complex, involving mapping data models, managing authentication, and handling notifications, but SlackKit offers a streamlined solution. This library, powered by KnockSlackProvider, includes components like SlackAuthButton and SlackChannelsCombobox, enabling engineering teams to add Slack channel notifications in Knock more efficiently. The process involves configuring environment variables, setting up a Slack app, and creating workflows, with detailed steps provided for setup and authentication. SlackKit allows users to initiate OAuth flows, associate Slack channels with Knock objects, and manage channel data, all while employing a user-friendly interface. The integration facilitates seamless communication across platforms, enhancing the app's value to users and enabling efficient notification management.

SlackKit is a newly launched suite of embeddable UIs and APIs designed to simplify the integration of products with Slack, enhancing user engagement by delivering notifications directly within the workspace environment. This suite, developed by Knock, manages OAuth connections and tokens, provides customizable UI components for channel selection, and offers a robust set of Slack-specific APIs to facilitate seamless integration. It addresses the complexities of building Slack integrations by offering ready-to-use components like <SlackAuthButton /> and <SlackChannelCombobox />, which streamline the process of OAuth management and channel selection. With a focus on accessibility, internationalization, and customization, SlackKit allows developers to effortlessly adopt Slack notifications into their applications, improving visibility and responsiveness while freeing up time for further product development. The suite is available to all Knock customers, with the option to start with a free account offering a monthly allowance of 10,000 notifications.

Vidyard, an online video platform, transitioned to using Knock for its notification infrastructure to enhance its product-led growth strategy and improve operational efficiency. Previously, Vidyard's in-house notification system was slow, complex, and fragmented, requiring weeks to implement changes, which hindered their ability to rapidly develop and release new features. By adopting Knock, Vidyard significantly reduced the time needed to introduce new notifications from weeks to mere hours or minutes, removed three internal services, and simplified their infrastructure related to message routing, preference management, and push notifications. This change not only expedited their feature deployment process but also allowed the team to focus more on core product development and experimentation with notifications to drive user engagement and product growth. The collaboration with Knock proved successful, meeting all project milestones and enabling Vidyard to efficiently launch new features such as Vidyard Rooms.

Vidyard, an online video platform known for serving major brands like Salesforce and Microsoft, significantly improved its notification system by transitioning to Knock, a third-party service, after finding their previous in-house system to be slow and fragmented. This shift allowed Vidyard to drastically reduce the time required to implement new notifications from several weeks to mere hours, enhancing their product-led growth strategy by expediting feature releases and reducing technical debt. The move to Knock enabled Vidyard to eliminate three internal services and improve the overall efficiency and understanding of their notification logic, which was previously a complex and time-consuming process that required coordination across multiple frontends and backend services. By leveraging Knock’s user-friendly APIs and robust developer experience, Vidyard was able to simplify their infrastructure and focus more on their core product, thereby accelerating their ability to experiment and learn from notifications to drive user engagement and growth.