August 2021 Summaries

TruTriage is a telehealth company that provides nurse triage services for non-emergency 911 callers, aiming to reduce the overuse of emergency healthcare resources. Since its founding in May 2019, TruTriage has bootstrapped and received funding from Conscious Venture Fund, and has built a platform connecting directly into 911 call centers. The startup faces challenges such as building out its software platform and meeting with potential customers, but aims to provide resources to underserved communities and improve healthcare access, outcomes, and affordability in the next three years.

We have built an example using Ruby 3.0.0 and Ruby on Rails 6.1.4.1, and the Vonage Voice API to create a simple Interactive Voice Response (IVR) service that accepts numeric input from callers and speaks back the input entered by the caller. To do this, we created a new Rails application, defined routes for two Controller actions (`answer` and `event`) that use Nexmo Call Control Objects (NCCO), configured ngrok to make our local development server externally accessible, set up a Vonage account, purchased a Vonage provisioned phone number, linked it to the application, and configured the Vonage application to accept phone calls and send them to the IVR Rails app. The application now provides a fully functional simple IVR service that can be tested by giving it a call at the purchased phone number.

This summary provides an overview of implementing a state machine in a messaging bot using Vonage's Messages API and Express.js. The bot receives incoming messages, checks the state database to determine the current state, and updates the state accordingly. The state machine is designed to guide the user through a series of steps, such as username registration, email address collection, and payment confirmation. The server uses an Express.js server with Vonage's Messages API to handle incoming messages and update the state database. The code provides examples of how to implement the state machine, including creating a database, defining states, and updating the state. The summary highlights the importance of using a state machine in messaging bots and provides resources for further learning about the Vonage Messages API.

You will learn how to create a chrome extension in this tutorial, specifically to hide Vonage API keys on the dashboard. To start, create a new folder for your extension and populate it with a manifest.json file that contains required information such as name, description, version, author, and manifest_version. The manifest.json file also specifies content scripts that can make changes to the DOM and pass information to the extension. You will then create an index.js file to contain JavaScript code that blurs API keys on specific webpages. Finally, you will import the folder into Chrome and test the functionality of your extension.

The Vonage CLI is in beta, offering a new plugin architecture that allows for modularizing packages better and enabling additional use cases and functionality. The CLI was built using oclif and Lerna to support multi-package repositories, making it easier to version and deploy plugins. The beta version can be installed using npm and offers various features such as authentication setup, In-App Conversations, and Users plugins. The developer advocate encourages users to test the CLI, report issues, and provide feedback to help improve it for v1.0.

Um JSON Web Token (JWT) é uma forma compacta e independente de transmitir informações de forma segura entre as partes como um objeto JSON, e eles são comumente usados pelas pessoas desenvolvedoras em suas APIs. Os JWTs são populares porque não precisam ser armazenados em um banco de dados para evitar ataques de segurança. Além disso, a assinatura de um JWT nunca é decodificada uma vez formada, garantindo assim que o token seja seguro e protegido. Um JWT pode ser configurado para ser inválido após um certo período de tempo, minimizando ou eliminando completamente qualquer dano que possa ser feito por um hacker caso o token seja hackeado. O uso de tokens de acesso e refresh permite a criação de uma experiência mais segura para os usuários, pois eles podem logar-se em diferentes dispositivos sem precisar fazer login novamente após 15 minutos. Além disso, o uso do JWT também permite a integração com outras APIs e serviços, como a API de Mensagens da Vonage, para enviar notificações aos usuários. Com o uso de tokens de acesso e refresh, as aplicações podem oferecer uma melhor experiência para os usuários e aumentar a segurança geralmente.

Victor Steven, a self-taught full-stack developer with over five years of experience, shares an extensive tutorial on implementing JSON Web Token (JWT) authentication in a Golang RESTful API, using the Vonage Messages API for notifications. The tutorial demonstrates creating, using, and invalidating JWTs, highlighting their advantages such as being stateless, secure, and having configurable expiration times. It details setting up a simple ToDo API, leveraging libraries like gin for HTTP requests and redis for storing JWT metadata, allowing immediate token invalidation upon user logout. The guide also covers the creation of access and refresh tokens, ensuring a smooth user experience by allowing token renewal without repeated logins, and integrating the Vonage API to notify users via SMS when a ToDo is created. This comprehensive walkthrough also suggests improvements, such as using a real database and front-end frameworks like React or Vue.js to fully utilize the refresh token feature with Axios Interceptors.

"Throttling bulk SMS campaigns to prevent overwhelming your team with a large number of incoming responses is crucial for maintaining efficiency and productivity." The article demonstrates how to implement this feature in Python using the Django REST framework and the Vonage Messages API, allowing developers to send messages to multiple users in batches at specified time intervals.

You can explore Vonage Video API capabilities in the Playground demo web app, which allows you to publish a stream and subscribe to it using your own project API key, based on the OpenTok.js SDK with available SDK versions up to the second-to-last. To access the Playground, you need a Vonage Video API account, which can be signed up for with free credit to start building. The Playground requires no code writing, and upon logging in, users can publish a stream, subscribe to it, use signaling, archiving, broadcasting, and SIP capabilities, as well as demo features like screen-sharing and interactive publishing/subscribing.

The Vonage Number Insights API can help companies verify if a phone number provided by a prospective client is real and active, which is valuable for services like insurance policies or mobile phone plans. A .NET microservice using the Vonage C# SDK client and Coravel can be built to accept messages from a message queue, process them by calling the Vonage API, and send a response back to the queue. The microservice simulates interacting with inputs and outputs via an event bus or queue, storing messages/events in the file system for simplicity. It uses a mock distributed messaging system to test and demonstrate its functionality, allowing each service to be autonomous and resilient.

Kilde is a Singapore-based FinTech company that aims to democratize the private debt market by providing a regulated investment platform for alternatives, bringing together borrowers and investors. The company was founded in November 2019 with the mission to solve the problem of cumbersome and risky ways to participate in alternative investments. Kilde differentiates itself from competitors through its expertise in sourcing high-quality borrowers and arranging unique deals for investors, while actively managing the risks of their investments. Despite facing challenges such as getting first customers on board and navigating a COVID-driven environment, Kilde has made progress since launching, including raising pre-seed funding and securing paying customers. The company's ambitions for the next 3-5 years include building a $5 billion outstanding loan portfolio, becoming one of the most sophisticated financial institutions globally, and expanding to major financial centers with a presence in multiple asset classes.

The text discusses how to retrieve performance stats of an ASP.NET Core 5 web application using C# and send out text notifications at pre-configured intervals of time using the Vonage SMS API. The application uses Quartz.NET for background jobs, NLog for logging data, and custom classes to encapsulate the functionality of sending notifications and retrieving performance stats. The application is configured by setting up dependencies such as NuGet packages, a Vonage API account, and configuration variables in the appsettings.json file. Once set up, the application schedules a job using a custom scheduler that runs every 5 seconds and sends notifications when CPU or memory usage crosses predefined thresholds.