OpenCompany Push Notifications Lambda function
Transparency, honesty, kindness, good stewardship, even humor, work in businesses at all times.
-- John Gerzema
Teams struggle to keep everyone on the same page. People are hyper-connected in the moment with chat and email, but it gets noisy as teams grow, and people miss key information. Everyone needs clear and consistent leadership, and the solution is surprisingly simple and effective - great leadership updates that build transparency and alignment.
With that in mind we designed Carrot, a software-as-a-service application powered by the open source OpenCompany platform and this source-available web UI.
With Carrot, important company updates, announcements, stories, and strategic plans create focused, topic-based conversations that keep everyone aligned without interruptions. When information is shared transparently, it inspires trust, new ideas and new levels of stakeholder engagement. Carrot makes it easy for leaders to engage with employees, investors, and customers, creating alignment for everyone.
Transparency expectations are changing. Organizations need to change as well if they are going to attract and retain savvy teams, investors and customers. Just as open source changed the way we build software, transparency changes how we build successful companies with information that is open, interactive, and always accessible. Carrot turns transparency into a competitive advantage.
To get started, head to: Carrot
Prospective users of Carrot should get started by going to Carrot.io. The following local setup is for developers wanting to work on the OpenCompany Notify Service.
Most of the dependencies are internal, meaning NPM will handle getting them for you. There are a few exceptions:
- Node - a JavaScript runtime built on Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine.
- NPM - Package management tool and Command Line Interface for node
- Amazon Web Services DynamoDB or DynamoDB Local - fast NoSQL database
The OpenCompany Web Application provides a Web UI for creating and consuming open company content and data.
The notify service is responsible for sending push notifications to mobile users. Currently we use Expo's Push Notification service to accomplish this task. The only viable SDK for working with this service at the time of writing was the expo-server-node-sdk. Because of this, the notify service includes a serverless project in the expo-push-notifications subfolder containing a few Lambda functions leveraging the SDK. When developing on these, it is useful to deploy experimental changes without disrupting staging/prod. To do so:
# Install serverless globally (one-time setup)
npm install -g serverless
cd expo-push-notifications
serverless deploy --stage dev
This will output the name of a Lambda function, the prefix of which will be used in the following configuration. For example, if the created Lambda function is named
expo-push-notifications-dev-sendPushNotifications, then the prefix would be expo-push-notifications-dev-.
You can then test it by sending a test payload like:
{
"notifications": [{"pushToken": "ExpoPushToken[AlmostValidToken]",
"body": "Some text here",
"data": {}},
{"pushToken": "VeryBadToken",
"body": "Some text here",
"data": {}}
]
}Distributed under the GNU Affero General Public License Version 3.
Copyright © 2015-2021 OpenCompany, LLC.
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more details.