September 2021 Summaries

The Vonage and Code Chrysalis API Night Hackathon was a successful event where students were challenged to build new apps using Vonage APIs in just four days. The hackathon began with an introduction to Vonage APIs and offered inspiring ideas for participants to start their projects. Students formed teams, chose roles, and decided on applications they wanted to build, including the team "Subarashi" that created CollabSpace, a solution to remote team collaboration issues. The application features video chat, document editing, and workspace controls, built with popular technologies like React, Redux, Express, and Nodejs. The event was a great success, with students deploying their applications on Heroku in just four days, and Vonage provided support and guidance throughout the process.

You're stranded on a deserted island with only your computer and WiFi, but you've got FastAPI and the Vonage Messages API to help you send an SMS to someone. You install FastAPI, create a virtual environment, and write a simple web application that sends an SMS using the Vonage API. The application allows users to enter a phone number and send an SMS with a predefined message. After successfully sending the SMS, the application displays a success message with the sent number. With this tutorial, you've learned how to build a simple FastAPI application that integrates with the Vonage Messages API to send SMS messages.

This article describes how to develop a multiparty video application using ReactJS and Vonage Video Express. The application includes features such as room and participant management, layout management, video quality optimization, network optimization, and ease of use. The app architecture is divided into two main sections: server-side and client-side, with the client-side being where most of the real action happens. The article provides a detailed explanation of how to implement various hooks, including `UseRoom`, `UseDevices`, and `UsePreviewPublisher`, which handle tasks such as initializing rooms, getting available devices, and previewing media. The application also includes a waiting room component that allows users to choose their audio and video devices before joining the call. Overall, this article provides a comprehensive guide on how to build a robust multiparty video application using ReactJS and Vonage Video Express.

As a former theatre actor turned full-stack web developer, Jim Seconde brings an unusual background to the Vonage Developer Relations team as PHP language Advocate. He has a strong passion for meeting up with developers and learning from them, which led him to start speaking on stage and writing about tech culture. With experience in SQL, Business Intelligence, and PHP development, Jim is well-versed in the language he will be advocating for, having taken the plunge into full stack web development in 2010. He is also involved with various meetups and usergroups, including the current PHP usergroup and Fusion meetup team, where he serves as Community Lead.

Vonage has developed Video Express, a high-level API that simplifies the development and integration of multiparty video into web applications, allowing for easier management of complex video call scenarios with multiple participants publishing and subscribing to each other's streams. This API optimizes for quality, CPU usage, and layout, removing complexity from traditional approaches like the Vonage Video API JavaScript Client SDK. It also offers features such as Quality Manager, Experience Manager, Layout Manager, Preview Publisher, and automatic screen sharing handling, making it easier to create high-quality video call experiences with minimal code.

Rachel Sunderland is a new Head of Community at Vonage, covering maternity leave. She brings experience in community management from her previous roles in Higher Education, where she focused on creating inclusive spaces for students to learn and be themselves. Rachel has transitioned into the tech industry, starting as an iOS & Android Developer Recruiter before moving into a role in Higher Education, and now finds herself in a full-time Developer Relations position. She reflects on her two months at Vonage, enjoying the team's tutorials and finding Slack to be a valuable tool for communication. Rachel is committed to improving support for the community and invites feedback from users.

Hacktoberfest is an annual month-long event where developers of all experience levels contribute to open-source projects, participate in events, complete pull requests, and support these projects financially. It has become a household name in the developer community after 8 years, with over 100,000 developers participating annually. The event incentivizes completing four pull requests faster, but this has led to issues of spam pull requests and the need for project maintainers to opt-in with tags to prevent unwanted contributions. Despite these challenges, Hacktoberfest remains a great opportunity for both new and experienced developers to contribute to open-source projects and support their maintenance. To participate or maintain an open-source project during Hacktoberfest, it is essential to be respectful, follow the project's code of conduct and contributions guidelines, and look for projects with specific tags. The event also requires project maintainers to prepare their repositories beforehand and spend time reviewing and approving pull requests.

Today marks a proud moment for everyone here as our Vonage CLI is now v1.0.0, allowing users to manage applications and numbers from the command line. The new version provides features such as creating, updating, linking, and deleting applications, managing application users, in-app conversations, and conversation members, buying or canceling phone numbers, searching inventory, viewing numbers, and accessing real-time number insights through the Number Insight API. The CLI also supports JWT creation for testing and development purposes. With the latest core available on npm, users can start exploring by installing it with `npm install -g @vonage/cli` and setting their config in their dashboard. The Nexmo CLI will move into maintenance mode until September 21, 2022, after which it will be officially deprecated. The developer advocate encourages user feedback and support to make the future of the CLI special.

This series is hosted on the Vonage Dev YouTube channel and aims to share knowledge in bite-sized portions, specifically focusing on the token roles in the Vonage Video API. Amanda Cavallaro, a Developer Advocate at Vonage, demonstrates how to generate and assign token roles for user authentication and permission management. The three possible token roles are subscriber, publisher, and moderator, each with varying levels of permissions and capabilities. By generating tokens using the video API Node.js server-side library, developers can authenticate users and control access to their sessions, including the ability to disconnect, mute, or stop publishing streams.

The text discusses web scraping, a powerful tool for collecting data from websites. It explains how to build a web scraper using Python and Beautiful Soup, a Python library that parses HTML and XML documents. The tutorial covers the basics of HTML, parsing, and regular expressions, which are used to extract meaningful information from website data. It also touches on common problems with web scraping, such as breaking scrapers and violating terms of service, and provides tips for using APIs instead. The text concludes by encouraging readers to learn more about web scraping and providing resources for further learning.

You have successfully set up a webhook endpoint in Node.js using Express to receive inbound SMS messages from Vonage, exposing your local server's endpoint as a public URL for development purposes with the help of ngrok. You can now send and receive SMS messages through this setup, allowing you to handle incoming messages and log their details. The process involves defining a webhook endpoint, setting it up in Vonage settings, writing code to handle POST requests with Express, and using ngrok to expose your local server's endpoint as a public URL.

You've built an app using Vonage Video API, and customers love its video chat feature, but occasionally encounter issues such as not being able to log in or share screens, which can be resolved by troubleshooting with the Session Inspector tool, a powerful suite of developer tools designed for debugging video sessions, allowing users to view quality metrics, user info, errors, and events, and access additional resources and training through workshops led by Sreekanth.

Karl is excited to join the Developer Relations Team at Vonage as a Ruby Developer Advocate. He brings a career spanning design, development, and developer education experience to this role. Karl enjoys learning, building, and sharing knowledge, and looks forward to combining these skills in his new position. He is also enthusiastic about discussing web technology topics, particularly on Twitter.