The open-source notification infrastructure

[scopsy]

Hi Community!
Looking forward to hear your thoughts about this.

Notifire was started out of pain me and @ComBarnea felt when developing products that required product based notifications. We've built the infrastructure so many times that we decided to take it out to the world. That's when Notifire was born. We took the multi-channel notifications and provided a unified set of API's to generate notification content and simplify delivery across multiple channels.

It's more than just sending an email or push

(Part of slacks notification system)

From our past experience, we know that a wholesome notification infrastructure requires more than a unified API. We believe that building a solid notification infrastructure is something that is accessible not only to fortune 500 companies but to every developer out there.

Notification infrastructure foundations

Smart Notification Engine

Using a stateful API instead of local config files can provide further functionality like:

• Run time changes without redeploying your code.
• Digest mechanism that allows to aggregate multiple events/messages to a single email or in-app notification for the customer. For example, a user received an email a minute ago, we don't want to send him/her the next one immediately and wait if further messages are planning to arrive.
• User preferences - With the ever-growing number of channels, an end-user can get notifications can create a lot of noise. Notification preferences are an expected thing from most users this day. A stateful API can manage all the complexities of it out of the box.
• Priority management - Not all notifications created equally, while password reset email must be delivered in real-time. Repeatable and frequent notifications can be throttled or scheduled to a later time.
• Timezone awareness - Send a specific set of notifications only in the user wake hours.
• Monitoring and webhook integrations to all the delivery providers.
• Analyze sending patterns and debug deliverability across multiple channels

In-app notification center

• An embeddable widget that is easy to integrate and customize.
• Real-time update using a socket.
• User preference widget to control the channels and motivation groups he would love to receive.
• The ability of the user to Snooze, mute and hide notifications easily.

We would love that everyone can have the best notification infrastructure possible without investing thousands of hours on it again and again. By the community. For the community.

Next steps

We are working on porting parts of the closed source platform we developed over the years to OSS. This includes an out-of-the-box API for managing notifications, an embeddable notifications widget, activity monitoring and more.

What are your thoughts about the need for such a system? Have you built something similar with your team? What would expect to see there?

[quemazote]

Trying to find a scenario for this? Would this be something you would use for support/IT, or do you see and end user needing this? I am thinking support scenarios where a team uses 8-10 systems but has to login to all of them with one account which makes things difficult since they might only have one phone number tied to the account. Using this you could send all notifications to a slack channel? Or am I missing something?

[scopsy]

Do you mean that you would love that a product you're not controlling for example zendesk will send notifications to your slack?

Our main usecase for this library is to provide product companies like zendesk, the ability to create notification experiences that are best suited for their users. For example allowing you to connect your slack account and get updates there instead of only getting them by mail or phone.

[darrenwinslow]

The digest mechanism, would this be part of the subscriber data (ex. so that a particular user could ask to have an email sent only once a day summarizing all activity - assuming there was activity)?

[scopsy]

Hi @darrenwinslow, in the first step we plan to provide a template-based digest configured by you, but building in a way to add support for user-based preference configuration override as well. The main blocker for the digest is the WorkFlow Editor we try to finalize the UI for right now :)