Twilio SendGrid

I was at some point looking for a way to loadtest some of my environments, staging initially, but including production as well, ultimately, to ensure our ability to scale when facing sudden bursts of requests, and understand how it would impact our load balancers, our instances, our database server... etc.

I came across Loader.io , a service by SendGrid labs which not only allowed my team and I to loadtest our API endpoints but also simulate actual user traffic on our website.

#LoadAndPerformanceTesting

Nexmo vs Twilio ?

Back in the early days at SmartZip Analytics, that evaluation had - for whatever reason - been made by Product Management. Some developers might have been consulted, but we hadn't made the final call and some key engineering aspects of it were omitted.

When revamping the platform, I made sure to flip the decision process how it should be. Business provided an input but Engineering lead the way and has the final say on all implementation matters. My engineers and I decided on re-evaluating the criteria and vendor selection. Not only did we need SMS support, but were we not thinking about #VoiceAndSms support as the use cases evolved.

Also, on an engineering standpoint, SDK mattered. Nexmo didn't have any. Twilio did. No-one would ever want to re-build from scratch integration layers vendors should naturally come up with and provide their customers with.

Twilio won on all fronts. Including costs and implementation timelines. No-one even noticed the vendor switch.

Many years later, Twilio demonstrated its position as a leader by holding conferences in the Bay Area, announcing features like Twilio Functions. Even acquired Authy which we also used for 2FA. Twilio's growth has been amazing. Its recent acquisition of SendGrid continues to show it.

Firebase Go Ember.js React Native React GraphQL SendGrid MySQL

Emberjs for our admins panels using ember-apollo and react native using apollo too for our apps, using golang graphql, services like SendGrid to send all the emails, Conekta to for accepting credit cards, firebase for our auth with facebook, google, phone, etc...

At StackShare we were discussing how to increase the retention of our newly signed up users. We hypothesized that if we made certain changes to the emails in our on-boarding process we could increase our retention and activation of users.

We decided to use sendwithus because it offered us the ability to A/B test our transactional emails. We also utilized the sendwithus analytics dashboard to gain real time insight into the performance of our email campaigns. Furthermore sendwithus has a Rails gem that allowed us to easily integrate the product into our application. We were also able to integrate sendwithus with our SendGrid account. #ABTestingAnalytics #TransactionalEmail

All our transactional emails go via Sendgrid, so account created, test started, test finished etc. SendGrid

I use DynECT SMTP however if that fails it will fail over to send grid SendGrid