Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

DynamoDB Key Partition Strategies for SaaS

Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service built for scalability and high performance. It’s one of the most popular databases used at SaaS companies, including Courier. We selected DynamoDB for the same reasons as everyone else: autoscaling, low cost, zero down time. However, at scale, DynamoDB can present serious performance issues.

Introducing Courier Elemental

Marking up notification emails with HTML out of the 1990s has always been an annoyance, but now notifications need to span across additional channels such as SMS, Slack, Microsoft Teams, mobile push, web push, etc. They also need to accommodate more dynamic use cases like magic login links, multi-language notifications, and location based alerts that have caused the content formatting challenge to become far more complicated and cumbersome.

How to Internationalize Your App's Product Notifications

Internationalization in software development, known as “i18n” for its number of letters, is as vital as ever for modern companies. Web-based products and services are no longer tied to geographical and cultural boundaries and not every potential customer speaks English. You might have designed your app with your native region in mind, but you’ll eventually need to expand your supported languages and regions to cater to a global audience.

Reflecting on 2021: 13X Product Usage, 14X ARR, 5X Team Growth

Companies have been remaking the work experience over the past couple of years. This has included adjusting the way they hire, reshaping communication standards to operate well in an at least partially remote atmosphere, and developing a stronger culture overall. These shifts and changes have certainly created obstacles for scaling, but we are proud to announce that 2021 was a fantastic year of growth at Courier!

Hacking PostgreSQL Internals to Deliver Push Notifications

PostgreSQL announced their latest version (PostgreSQL 14) on September 30th, which includes a bunch of features like pipeline API, gathering statistics on replication slots, query parallelism improvements and so on. While the origin of PostgreSQL can be traced back to 1986, it has been in active development for the past 30 years.

How We Use Internal Hackathons to Create New Product Features

An internal hackathon is an effective way to engage your employees in short-term collaborative events. It spurs innovation, increases employee engagement, explores new feature possibilities, imparts corporate culture, and builds teamwork and collaboration skills. By organizing internal hackathons in your company, your employees can challenge and compete to solve internal or customer problems—which can lead to real-life features in your product.

3 Types of User Communication APIs and When to Use Them

As modern applications have become increasingly feature-rich and performant, user expectations are at an all-time high. Failure to communicate key information or displaying out-of-date information frustrates users and causes a loss of trust. Think about the last time you ordered something online: if you didn’t receive your order confirmation within seconds, you probably began to worry that something went wrong. Users require product transparency for consistent use.

The Developer's Guide to Building Notification Systems: Observability and Analytics

At your CTO’s request, you recently started researching how to go about revamping or building your product’s notification system. You realized the complexity of this project around the same time as you discovered that there’s not a lot of information online on how to do it. Companies like LinkedIn, Uber, and Slack have large teams working just on notifications, but smaller companies like yours don’t have that luxury.