August 2018 Summaries

Nylas has announced its Series B funding led by Spark Capital, with Andrew Parker from Spark Capital joining their board. The company, founded in 2013, provides an API that facilitates seamless integration of email, calendar, and contact data into applications, addressing the complexity faced by developers in leveraging this vast communication network. With the new funding, Nylas aims to expand its team and customer base, having already achieved significant milestones like handling over 100 million API requests daily and syncing 15 billion emails. The company is proud of its SOC-2 certification and GDPR compliance and has added high-profile clients such as Hyundai and Newscorp. Nylas is focused on becoming the default tool for developers integrating inbox data, akin to how Stripe and Twilio are trusted in their domains. Core values like customer focus, action bias, diversity, transparency, and work-life balance guide their growth strategy.

This tutorial provides a comprehensive guide on creating a Slack scheduler bot that can add events to a personal calendar using the Nylas Calendar API and a simple Slack slash command. It outlines the necessary prerequisites, such as having a GitHub and Heroku account, a Slack workspace, and a text editor. The tutorial is divided into several parts, starting with the basic app setup, deploying the application on Heroku, configuring Heroku variables, connecting the app to Slack, adding text parsing functionality, and finally building the scheduling functionality that interacts with the Nylas API. It includes detailed instructions for setting up a Slack app with a slash command, using regular expressions for text parsing, and handling API requests to schedule events. Additionally, it provides troubleshooting tips and suggests potential extensions to enhance the bot's capabilities, such as adding event descriptions, locations, participants, and handling recurring or existing events.

The Nylas Calendar API offers a streamlined solution for integrating calendar sync capabilities into applications, allowing developers to bypass the complexity of building individual connections with multiple calendar providers like Gmail, Outlook.com, Exchange, and Office 365. By serving as an abstraction layer, the Nylas API enables real-time, secure updates and full CRUD operations, supporting features such as booking, cancellations, appointment reminders, and task scheduling. The API also provides productivity analytics by analyzing cross-team availability and calendar usage, aiding in time management improvements. With quick-start SDKs available in Ruby, Node.js, and Python, developers can integrate the API with minimal code, focusing more on feature development rather than infrastructure maintenance. Additionally, Nylas ensures enterprise-grade security and privacy, being SOC2 Certified, GDPR compliant, and employing encryption standards to protect user data.