Haven’t been to Infobip Shift Conference yet? We’re flipping the script and bringing it to you! Join us for the first Infobip Shift meetup in San Francisco on October 21st!
The Shift team wants to meet more local developer communities, so we’re going on the road across Northern America. After Seattle and Oakland, the next stop is San Francisco – the home of Uber, Slack, Asana, DropBox, Reddit, Airbnb, and many other greats.
The first speaker at the San Francisco meetup is Joyce Lin, Head of Developer Relations at Postman. She will give, as she likes to say it, a gentle introduction to working with gRPC APIs in Postman. Attendees will gain insight into gRPC APIs and how they compare to REST APIs, Joyce says:
“We will learn how to send gRPC API calls, test them, and generate a mock server for local development. They can follow along if they choose to.“
The best way to learn new technology is to play around with it
Joyce explains that RPC is gaining popularity in companies with microservice architectures and among mobile developers because it’s more performant:
“That is helpful for faster communication between microservices. And also efficient for low-power clients and mobile devices.“
This is because gRPC APIs rely on HTTP 2.0 and Protocol Buffers, states Joyce, which makes them 7 to 10 times faster than REST APIs. The protocol also supports more methods of transferring data.
There is, however, a steeper learning curve with gRPC since it’s a newer technology, Joyce points out. Community adoption is not widespread among developers and organizations. Also, the tooling and infrastructure haven’t caught up to support HTTP2 the way it supports HTTP web APIs. The key to making it less steep, according to Joyce, is to have fun with it:
I think playing around with new technology is the best way to learn it. Postman is a tool used by developers to explore, test, and learn how APIs work. That’s what we’ll do in this session.
Why is it important to know your customer during a transaction?
The second speaker is the CEO & Founder of Spendgo, Ivan Matkovic. He will talk about how restaurants and retailers use Spendgo to authenticate/manage their customer profiles and how Spendgo integrates that data with Infobip to drive increased opt-in and unique transaction flows.
The attendees can expect to learn the value created by knowing exactly who the customer is during a transaction and ways to reduce friction in identifying them. Ivan explains:
“Direct customer relationships are vital for restaurants and retailers. Without them, brands constantly keep spending on expensive marketing campaigns to get new people in the door. “
When a customer makes a purchase, that is the best opportunity to ask them to opt into direct marketing because they are highly engaged at that moment. Once they leave your store or website, it becomes infinitely harder to reach them again, warns Ivan.
Writing an individual integration is fairly straightforward, but managing and working in such a variety of environments is extremely difficult to scale, which is the problem in restaurant and retail technology, Ivan points out:
“So wherever you can consolidate underlying platform partners, it helps. This is the big opportunity when partnering with Infobip; you have one platform to handle all your communication needs.“
Hitchhiker’s guide to MFA
Alongside Ashish and Ivan, Infobip’s Developer Relations Team Lead Julia Biro will introduce us to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to MFA. In the same way a mechanic’s car is always broken, many devs fall short regarding password security and authentication, Julia explains. How does she know that? Well, she was one of them. Because of that, Julia’s talk will focus on where things go awry:
Let’s see what options we have for improving the situation— for ourselves or the users of the apps we build.
Learn more about RPC and the integration of messaging opt-ins at the Postman office in San Francisco on October 21!
