January 2021 Summaries

As a seasoned content and marketing professional with 10 years of experience, Daniela is excited to join Nexmo as Developer Education Coordinator, bringing her passion for learning to code and tech communities to the role. Originally from Italy, she has called London home since 2012 and recently completed a Front End Development course at General Assembly, which sparked her interest in developers and tech. In her free time, Daniela enjoys traveling, hiking, and volunteering with stray dogs, and is looking forward to working remotely and occasionally spending time in the London office to coordinate Nexmo's Developer Education efforts.

Vonage partnered with Hack the North 2020++ as a sponsor, providing resources to empower students to turn their ideas into reality. The organization hosted workshops, tech talks, and career sessions, and received over 50 project submissions for the Best Use of Vonage API Challenge. The winning submission, PrioVax, developed an application to facilitate COVID-19 vaccine distribution within local communities, utilizing machine learning algorithms to identify high-risk patients and prioritize their vaccination appointments. Other notable projects included Accima, which used AI-powered tools to analyze vocal skills and photography; min.it, a web application that generates meeting minutes in real-time; MoniMango, a platform for analyzing public sentiment on stocks; Offline, a mobile app that allows users to access the web without internet access; CopyCat, a teambuilding exercise that uses computer vision to recognize similarities in actions; Jump!, a real-time multiplayer competitive exercise game powered by computer vision; Pushup Battle, a website that tracks pushups and declares winners; and vibecheck, an application that converts voice call input into a curated music playlist. Vonage's goal is to continue sharing knowledge with students and preparing for the future of software development.

The Vonage Voice API allows users to make and receive phone calls, with features such as text-to-speech messages, streaming audio files into calls, forwarding, and placing calls in conferences. Zapier integrates this API, enabling users to create workflows that automate repetitive tasks by connecting two or more apps. The integration offers eight events: four triggers and four actions, which can be used to trigger a workflow when someone rings the Vonage number or initiate an outbound call. Triggers include polling and instant triggers, with all Vonage Voice triggers being instant triggers that start a workflow when an inbound call reaches one of the virtual numbers. Actions include creating text-to-speech calls, streaming audio files into calls, forwarding calls, and placing calls in conferences. Users can add these actions to their workflows to automate tasks such as sending reminders or notifications.

This server provides a Two-factor Authentication (2FA) API using the Ktor framework, allowing desktop clients, mobile devices, and web applications to utilize two-factor authentication. The application is built in Kotlin and uses the Vonage API for 2FA functionality. The server includes two API endpoints: `verifyNumber` and `verifyCode`, which handle the verification process for phone numbers and verification codes respectively. The application uses JSON serialization and deserialization, and enables serializaton through the Ktor application configuration. The code is available on GitHub, along with additional tutorials and resources for further learning and implementation.

This tutorial guides you through setting up a server using Go and the Vonage API to receive voice calls, play an audio file into the call, and add a Text-To-Speech message to the call. To follow along with this tutorial, you need a phone number, a Vonage API account, and a virtual phone number purchased from Vonage. You will create a new Go application with a single webhook URL to handle incoming calls, run the server using `http.ListenAndServe(":3000", nil)`, and write code to play an audio file into the active call. To expose your project to the internet, you can use Ngrok to get a public URL for your application and configure it in the Vonage Dashboard. Once set up, you can test your project by calling the virtual number and triggering the event to play the audio file into the call.

The Vonage Number Insight API provides valuable insights about phone numbers, including validity checks and information about the network provider, country, and international dialing options. To use the API, developers need to install the Go SDK and create an account with a Vonage API key and secret. The API offers three levels of insight: basic, standard, and advanced, each providing more detailed information about the phone number. Basic insights provide general information, while standard and advanced insights offer more detailed data on network providers and international dialing options. Advanced insights also include additional information such as the name of the person associated with the phone number, but require an asynchronous request and a webserver to receive the response.

The Vonage SMS API is used to send text messages programmatically with Vapor framework. A Vonage API account is required for this tutorial, and the necessary dependencies are installed in Xcode 12 using Swift 5 or greater. The project is set up by creating a new Vapor project and adding a .env file to store API credentials. A web page is created to enter phone numbers and messages for SMS sending, and model structs are defined to conform to the Codable protocol. The /send route is defined in the routes function to parse form data, make an HTTP call to the Vonage SMS API, and return the response status to the view renderer.

Our iOS Push Certificate Uploading Tool has been released, simplifying the process of uploading Apple Push Certificates to Vonage by eliminating the need for manual JWT generation and terminal commands. The tool uses your Vonage Application ID, private key, and certificate, along with Node.js and a JWT generator, to authenticate an HTTP request that uploads the certificate, providing real-time status updates.

Visual Studio Code is a highly extensible code editor used by developers for most of their development time, and streamlining and automating tasks can greatly improve productivity. The author has compiled a list of daily-used extensions that aim to save time and enhance productivity in 2021, including Bracket Pair Colorizer 2, Remote Containers, Import Cost, Path Intellisense, Live Share, Peacock, Prettier, Quokka.js, Better Comments, Settings Sync, Remote - SSH, and Polacode. These extensions can help developers with tasks such as code formatting, debugging, commenting, and sharing code snippets, while also providing features like live co-editing, audio calls, and terminal sharing. The author invites readers to share their favorite VS Code extensions that improve developer productivity in the comments or on Twitter.