The Courier Blog

How I used Unity and Courier to Create a Notification-based Game

I got featured in Courier’s live stream to build a notification-based game with Unity Engine, Courier, Twilio, and Mailjet. In this article, I will walk through the design of this game, called Rain Spikes, and provide a step-by-step explanation of how I used Courier to integrate notifications into the game.

Nodemailer and the SaaS Paradox of Choice

In this blog post, we start by diving into Nodemailer, a module that helps send emails from your Node.js backend, and then we steer our way into writing a transport layer plugin that can help you switch downstream email service providers purely by configuration instead of tedious and sometimes massive code changes.

Why Software Accessibility Matters

An accessible product is usable for everyone, regardless of physical and cognitive abilities. Making sure your software and its documentation is accessible is not only the right thing to do, it’s the smart thing to do—and it’s actually not that difficult.

Journey Mapping: How to Master the Art of Interrupting

Too many bad notifications can frustrate users and eventually lead them to abandon your product entirely. Notifications are only valuable to the user experience if they’re designed by the user experience.

The Notifications Strategy that Put Us in the Product Hunt Newsletter

We were able to execute a strategy that helped us rank #5 on launch day and were featured in the Product Hunt newsletter the next day. Here is how we did it.

Why You Can't Replace REST with GraphQL

The question isn’t necessarily which one is better to use, but which one is better to use for specific circumstances. The best way to evaluate GraphQL, REST, or any other technology is to figure out your constraints based on the problem you are going to solve.

How to Add a Notification System to your MVP

At the MVP stage, developers focus on finding product-market fit for their venture. On the one hand, this means experimenting with functionality that’s capable of creating value. On the other hand, teams at this phase start requiring less and less time on every new experiment, before finding something that works. In this article, we show you how to build a notification system for your MVP, in a way that both enables experimentation and helps you get results quickly.

How We Built React Components for Any Front End

To make sure teams don’t need to build an in-house solution for a notification systems problem, we adapted our offering. We created a lightweight solution using React that has a global state and runs independently in the background, so teams can render our components regardless of their tech stack.

How to Use Notifications to Build a Game in 36 Hours

Matt Gaber, a recent grad from UMD, built a game using Courier at the 2021 Bitcamp Hackathon. Let's dive into how he got the idea for Package person, how he built it with Courier as a part of his suite of tools, and his reflections on the project.