October 2020 Summaries

The rise of low-code application development platforms is transforming the way companies build applications, with Gartner predicting that 65% of application development will be done using these platforms by 2024. This shift impacts various sectors such as customer experience, finance, healthcare, and more, enabling developers to quickly build comprehensive applications that replace legacy systems. OutSystems is a recognized leader in modern application development, offering a visual development environment with drag-and-drop components, including Vonage-powered workflows, available on the OutSystems Forge marketplace. The company has partnered with Vonage to offer a developer challenge, allowing participants to learn and experiment with building an application project and win prizes.

Probot (GitHub Apps) and GitHub Actions are two separate projects that aim to enable developers to extend their workflows and customize the way GitHub functions. Probot offers 12 automation tools, including Request Info, No Response, Mergeable, Auto Assign, Stale, First Timers, which help project maintainers by automating tasks such as requesting more information from authors, closing issues with no response, merging pull requests based on configurations, and assigning reviewers to pull requests. GitHub Actions provides additional tools like Lint, Size Limit, LibreSelery, Lock Threads, Pull Request Labeler, and Alex, which also automate various tasks, including linting, performance budgeting, continuous funding distribution, locking closed issues, labeling pull requests based on committed files, and catching insensitive writing. By leveraging these automation tools, developers can focus on more impactful tasks while maintaining their open source projects.

Creating a user management system using Amazon Cognito and the Vonage Verify API is made easier with a few web forms, Vonage SDK, and AWS SDK. The use of a standard user management system allows users to register, update their credentials, validate their identity, and login. This can be achieved by setting up an Amazon Cognito User Pool, creating an app client, and using the Vonage Verify API to verify user identities. The example code provided is for educational purposes only and does not include proper framework usage, CSS styling, or JavaScript. To complete this tutorial, a Vonage API account is required, as well as PHP 7.4 and Composer installed globally. Once the setup is complete, users can register, update their credentials, validate their identity, and login to the system, with an option to logout after successful login.

One-time passwords (OTPs) are becoming increasingly familiar due to their security benefits over traditional passwords. OTPs can be used instead of or alongside traditional passwords for authentication, ensuring user identity through a communication medium owned by the user, such as a mailbox, phone, or specific app. An OTP service is proposed using two Web APIs: one for creating and sending OTPs via Facebook Messenger or SMS, and another for verifying received OTPs. The OTP service has no user interface and acts as a microservice to generate and verify OTPs. To use this service, Node.js 8.11+ is required, along with a Vonage API account, an application to send HTTP requests, and specific settings in the Vonage API dashboard. The service consists of three components: otpManager, otpRepository, and otpSender, which work together to create, store, and deliver OTPs. The otpManager generates random OTPs, stores them in a file system, and verifies their validity. The otpSender uses the Vonage Dispatch API to send OTPs via Messenger or SMS.

$ python -c 'import sys;print("".join([chr(48+ord(x)-37) if "0<=x<=9" else chr(65+x-64) if "10<=x<=35" else chr(97+x-78) if "36<=x<=61" else chr(63+x-65) for x in sys.stdin.read()]).replace("-",""))

The Vonage Communication APIs offer a way to send SMS messages asynchronously using exponential backoff and jitter, which helps manage API call throughput and avoid rate limits. To complete this tutorial, you need a Vonage API account and a virtual phone number. The tutorial covers how to create an application, link the number to it, and use the Vonage Python SDK to generate a JWT for authentication. The `send_sms` function makes an asynchronous POST request to the Messages API with the generated JWT, headers, and payload. To queue the SMS in a loop, you can add a short sleep between tasks, which helps get closer to the rate limit without exceeding it. The tutorial also discusses how to use Python backoff and jitter to manage API call throughput and avoid rate limits.