Archive for the ‘How HipChat Works’ Category

Garret Heaton

How HipChat works: SMS chat with Twilio

By Garret Heaton | 3 months ago | View Comments |

Earlier this week we released a mobile alerts feature allowing users to hook up their cell phones and participate in one-on-one chats while away from the computer. Having SMS support is important to us because just about everyone has a cell phone but not necessarily a smart phone capable of running our web chat. Adding SMS support turned out to be quite simple thanks to Twilio. Here’s why:

1. Cost – At first we thought we’d have to use short codes to send our messages. They’re the 5 or 6 digit numbers you can text vote on American Idol, get crappy ringtones, etc. Unfortunately they’re about $500/mo each (and some companies will charge you much more). We also looked at using a shared short code but you can’t do two-way SMS (send and receive) with them. Twilio lets you use local numbers for $1/mo that can send up to 1 message per second. This means we can just add more numbers as our volume increases. Finally, each message (in or out) is just $0.03.

2. Setup speed – It takes about 90 days and a bunch of approvals to get a short code, probably because you can use them to charge people monthly fees. Allocating a local number on Twilio takes about 15 seconds (even less if you do it through their API).

3. Two-way messaging – We need to be told about replies to the messages we send so mobile users can actually have conversations. We also need to use a different phone number for each chat session you have so that we know who you’re replying to (that’s where the short codes get really expensive). Twilio will hit a URL we provide with information about each incoming SMS so we can deliver them to the right person.

Note: If you’re just doing low-volume one-way messaging you can probably get away with email-to-SMS gateways.

4. Clean API – Twilio’s REST API is easy to use, and has a PHP library available. We just wish they had JSON support. By the way, we’re getting really close to releasing our own API!

5. Good support – They were far more helpful and responsive than other SMS gateway providers. We had the feature built and working in about 2 days.

We hope everyone enjoys the new SMS chat feature and that some of you will have the pleasure of adding SMS (or voice) support to your own app.

Garret Heaton

How HipChat works: Cooking with Chef

By Garret Heaton | 5 months ago | View Comments |

We use of a lot of great third-party software and services here at HipChat and thought it’d be nice to share some of our favorites. The first tool we’d like to highlight is Opscode’s Chef, a framework we use to configure our servers quickly and consistently.

Chef lets us write source code (example) describing the services we want to run and then takes care of installing and managing them for us. If you’re not the server-managing type, think of Chef like a robot that knows how to set up all your favorite software on that new computer you just got. Instead of spending all day doing it yourself, Chef does it in a few minutes. Once you’re running a service like HipChat that requires multiple servers, this sort of automated setup is a huge time saver.

If you manage servers or are just interested in the technical details, check out the Chef site and wiki. The Opscode team also provides great chat support in their IRC channel, something we’re big fans of. Thanks to Opscode and the Chef community for a great product!