Show HN: Open-Sourcing InboxSDK (YC S11) – Build Apps in Gmail
15 by alooPotato | 2 comments on Hacker News.
Hi HN! We’re Aleem, Chris, Borys, Meichen and Zach from Streak (YC S11) and today we’re open sourcing our InboxSDK https://ift.tt/BHsKoYf , which makes it easy to build apps for Gmail. Over 1.8B users spend their days in Gmail! Having your app built into the Gmail workflow is a better user experience and gives you great user retention. InboxSDK gives you a high-level, declarative API to insert your UI into Gmail without having to directly manipulate the DOM yourself. End users install a browser extension to use your app. The SDK can add UI to multiple areas of Gmail. For example, adding a button is as simple as: composeView.addButton({ title: "My Nifty Button!", iconUrl: 'https://ift.tt/Y0iPsgw', onClick: function(event) { event.composeView.insertTextIntoBodyAtCursor('Hello World!'); }, }); InboxSDK enables you to add info to the sidebar on threads, add items in the left navigation tree, insert results into the search box, navigate to full page routes, add toolbar buttons to the compose window, add label indicators to thread list views and many more. You can see some examples in my comment posted below. Hubspot, Dropbox, Giphy, Clickup, Loom, Todoist, Clearbit and our own Streak have all built apps using the InboxSDK. The InboxSDK is open source dual-licensed under the MIT and Apache 2.0 licenses for maximum flexibility. Why use the InboxSDK over rolling it yourself? Several reasons: (1) it’s hard to do DOM manipulation in a performant way; (2) you need to handle all the different configurations of Gmail—there are a lot, and they change often: e.g. conversation view on/off, multiple inboxes, chat left/right, personal vs Workspace accounts; (3) You have to maintain compatibility with tons of other Gmail extensions so you don’t stomp over each other. On a technical level, the InboxSDK handles all the DOM watching and manipulation, XHR interception, multiple extension coordination, and exposes a high level API to developers. We make use of page-parser-tree, another package we open sourced that helps detect elements on the page performantly. The trickiest bit we handle is intercepting and modifying network requests that Gmail makes in order to support several of the APIs we expose. We’ve been building this SDK for years - it’s what powers Streak (www.streak.com), an 8 figure ARR SaaS business. We built the InboxSDK for ourselves because we wanted to separate our logic for wrangling Gmail from that of our app. Several years ago we let developers use a hosted version of our SDK. We didn’t want anyone else to go through the same pain to integrate deeply with Gmail. There were two unexpected benefits: It vastly increased the number of end users (20M+) using apps built on our SDK. This gave us significant leverage with Google. They are super supportive of the SDK and give us early access to several builds to ensure the SDK doesn’t break when they make updates to Gmail. We spent an ungodly amount of time maintaining compatibility with other Gmail extensions. Once the InboxSDK became a defacto standard, all the apps (currently >1000) that used it were instantly compatible (the InboxSDK operates under the model that there will be several extensions running at the same time and it elects a leader to route all modification through). Why open source it now? First, several companies were nervous about us hosting the SDK. We mainly did this so that every extension was running the same version of the SDK, but with the recent Chrome manifest V3 changes, remote code execution is no longer supported. Not hosting the SDK removed the primary reason why the project needed to be closed source. We do need to figure out a new way of keeping all developers relatively up to date on the latest version of the SDK, any ideas? We’d love feedback! The repo is https://ift.tt/KWbl3dC , and the docs are: https://ift.tt/FAETqWG
Tuesday, 11 October 2022
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Show HN: My book for programmers called “Junior to Senior” was published today
38 by dglass | 7 comments on Hacker News.
After a four year journey, the book I wrote to help junior and mid-level programmers earn their first promotion was published today . The book is titled Junior to Senior: Career Advice for the Ambitious Programmer and is now available on Holloway’s website[0]. I truly believe that soft-skills are what makes the difference between a good programmer and a great one. I also believe that anyone can learn the soft-skills needed to accelerate their programming career. I wish I’d had better resources to learn these things in the early years of my career and I’m hoping this book will become a useful resource for the next generation of programmers to build successful careers. What this book covers: Choosing a career path: generalist vs. specialist What makes you a senior engineer? How to deal with feeling like an impostor How to build trust and work with your manager How to recover when you make a mistake, and what to do during incidents How to ask better questions How to read and understand unfamiliar code How to add value to your team and company How to identify and manage risk How to deliver better results How to communicate more effectively with both technical and non-technical audiences The importance of a healthy work-life balance How to ask for a promotion, and how to prepare for it I wrote this book because these soft-skills are rarely taught in coding bootcamps or computer science degrees, yet they are critical to every programmer’s career trajectory. Almost every programmer I know, including me, had to learn and develop these soft-skills on the job. It took hard work and a lot of trial and error to learn how to communicate my ideas effectively, navigate office politics, manage risk, and so many other things that programmers encounter in their jobs today. Get instant lifetime access at holloway.com. Use this link for a launch discount: [0]: https://ift.tt/2jr1VAJ...
38 by dglass | 7 comments on Hacker News.
After a four year journey, the book I wrote to help junior and mid-level programmers earn their first promotion was published today . The book is titled Junior to Senior: Career Advice for the Ambitious Programmer and is now available on Holloway’s website[0]. I truly believe that soft-skills are what makes the difference between a good programmer and a great one. I also believe that anyone can learn the soft-skills needed to accelerate their programming career. I wish I’d had better resources to learn these things in the early years of my career and I’m hoping this book will become a useful resource for the next generation of programmers to build successful careers. What this book covers: Choosing a career path: generalist vs. specialist What makes you a senior engineer? How to deal with feeling like an impostor How to build trust and work with your manager How to recover when you make a mistake, and what to do during incidents How to ask better questions How to read and understand unfamiliar code How to add value to your team and company How to identify and manage risk How to deliver better results How to communicate more effectively with both technical and non-technical audiences The importance of a healthy work-life balance How to ask for a promotion, and how to prepare for it I wrote this book because these soft-skills are rarely taught in coding bootcamps or computer science degrees, yet they are critical to every programmer’s career trajectory. Almost every programmer I know, including me, had to learn and develop these soft-skills on the job. It took hard work and a lot of trial and error to learn how to communicate my ideas effectively, navigate office politics, manage risk, and so many other things that programmers encounter in their jobs today. Get instant lifetime access at holloway.com. Use this link for a launch discount: [0]: https://ift.tt/2jr1VAJ...
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Show HN: Try Enarx
1 by rjzak | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Enarx runs Web Assembly applications on special CPUs to protect the application from the host (Intel SGX, AMD SNP-SEV). Try out Enarx with your application on real hardware.
1 by rjzak | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Enarx runs Web Assembly applications on special CPUs to protect the application from the host (Intel SGX, AMD SNP-SEV). Try out Enarx with your application on real hardware.
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Show HN: Filelove – minimal P2P file transfer right in the browser
3 by midzer | 1 comments on Hacker News.
3 by midzer | 1 comments on Hacker News.
Monday, 10 October 2022
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Show HN: Linkidex – Bookmarks, but way better.
2 by rdavidr | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Hi HN! My name is David (david@linkidex.com) and I am the author of Linkidex (www.linkidex.com)! My goal is to make bookmarks better. I built Linkidex because I was getting overwhelmed by the number of things I had to keep track of on the internet during my day to day job. Constantly needing to re-find various wikis or jira epics or project proposals or whatever was eating into my day. I was using a chrome extension to manage urls, but the extension was getting unwieldy as my list of “important URLs” grew and I started looking for alternatives. There are a few really cool bookmark managers out there, but I wasn’t satisfied with what I saw. Regular bookmarks don’t cut it either for me as I need something that works across browsers and devices. Thus, Linkidex was born. The most basic idea with Linkidex is that you can go to Linkidex and just start typing. Linkidex will search across your link titles, link urls, categories, and tags all at once. Click the result you are looking for and it opens in a new tab. If you want to scope your search by specific categories or tags you can do that too. Linkidex is a progressive web application. It (mostly) works offline and it can be downloaded to your phone and act like a native app without requiring you to grant it any permissions. The back end is rails, and the front end is React, Typescript and GraphQL. Security wise it is deployed to AWS. The database and back end are all wrapped up in a VPC. The front end supports 2 factor and WebAuthn, so you can use a yubikey or your device's fingerprint reader as your second factor. Linkidex can import and export bookmarks to and from your favorite browser. That said, I’ve limited the number of links / categories / tags a given user can have for now on Linkidex to prevent anything insane from happening. All feedback / feature requests / complaints / whatever welcome. Thanks for checking out Linkidex!
2 by rdavidr | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Hi HN! My name is David (david@linkidex.com) and I am the author of Linkidex (www.linkidex.com)! My goal is to make bookmarks better. I built Linkidex because I was getting overwhelmed by the number of things I had to keep track of on the internet during my day to day job. Constantly needing to re-find various wikis or jira epics or project proposals or whatever was eating into my day. I was using a chrome extension to manage urls, but the extension was getting unwieldy as my list of “important URLs” grew and I started looking for alternatives. There are a few really cool bookmark managers out there, but I wasn’t satisfied with what I saw. Regular bookmarks don’t cut it either for me as I need something that works across browsers and devices. Thus, Linkidex was born. The most basic idea with Linkidex is that you can go to Linkidex and just start typing. Linkidex will search across your link titles, link urls, categories, and tags all at once. Click the result you are looking for and it opens in a new tab. If you want to scope your search by specific categories or tags you can do that too. Linkidex is a progressive web application. It (mostly) works offline and it can be downloaded to your phone and act like a native app without requiring you to grant it any permissions. The back end is rails, and the front end is React, Typescript and GraphQL. Security wise it is deployed to AWS. The database and back end are all wrapped up in a VPC. The front end supports 2 factor and WebAuthn, so you can use a yubikey or your device's fingerprint reader as your second factor. Linkidex can import and export bookmarks to and from your favorite browser. That said, I’ve limited the number of links / categories / tags a given user can have for now on Linkidex to prevent anything insane from happening. All feedback / feature requests / complaints / whatever welcome. Thanks for checking out Linkidex!
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Show HN: Minimal, no-JS web forum software
2 by demindiro | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Hello HN! I've found my SQL knowledge to be lacking, so I made a project that uses SQLite as a backend. As it is intended for self-hosting I aim to make it easy to set up and maintain. Getting it up & running takes no more than a few commands (bar setting up a proxy such as nginx, which is out of scope). I've set up a "demo" site at https://ift.tt/qIotz6m if you want to try out the UI.
2 by demindiro | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Hello HN! I've found my SQL knowledge to be lacking, so I made a project that uses SQLite as a backend. As it is intended for self-hosting I aim to make it easy to set up and maintain. Getting it up & running takes no more than a few commands (bar setting up a proxy such as nginx, which is out of scope). I've set up a "demo" site at https://ift.tt/qIotz6m if you want to try out the UI.
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Show HN: Prevent Google Analytics data from being blocked by ad blockers
3 by alfonmga | 5 comments on Hacker News.
3 by alfonmga | 5 comments on Hacker News.
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