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Iteration Podcast

Third-Party API's 🔌

This week: Essential integrations / services / API' s

We are going to be talking through the main / really popular API partners out there and give some quick feedback on how to integrate/go about them. Plus some lessons learned to keep in mind when planning integrations like this.

Sendgrid + Other Transactional Email

John: Formatting emails — inline styles only.

John: Some services have "Templates" with "Placeholders", some you pass the full HTML

John: Having some kind fo "log" object in your own domain can be very helpful.

John: Priority on background jobs for timely emails —

JP: Iterable. Opendoor uses this tool to send text, email, and push notifications. Everything hinges around handlebars / mustache and OOF - inline styles

JP: Side project with send grid, just a list of template ids

await deliverTemplateEmail({ to: user.emailAddress, templateId: SOME_TEMPLATE_ID, data: { contactFirstName: user.firstName, viewMyAccountLink: ${config.BASE_URL}/user/dashboard, }, });

Stripe + Other Payment Providers

  • John: Tokenization and data storage
  • John: Drop in vs Whitelabel — "Checkout" vs "Elements"
  • John: Embrace Test Mode in Stipe (Super powerful)
  • John: Subscriptions, Promocodes + More
  • JP: I actually don't have much to say about payment providers. The interesting thing is that in Opendoor world, we hand off our users to an operator. I.e. you wouldn't purchase a home a la Amazon

Twilio (SMS)

  • John: STOP replies edge case
  • John: Logs are helpful
  • John: Twilio Webhooks
  • John: Testing mocks is really useful
  • JP: Seriously, twilio powers the world. We've used tools that hook into Twilio that provide an interface for customer support. See Front App

Scheduler / Chron Jobs

  • John: Heroku Scheduler
  • John: Think about failure handling, resend logic into scheudulers

OAuth Login?

Other?

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