Although I had traveled to Orlando for work many times before, I had never taken the time to go to Disney World. That changed in May, when I found myself attending DEVintersection at Disney World to help staff the SparkPost booth, talk to fellow developers, and generally geek out.

Sparky is All Ears

It was an amazing experience to have hundreds of people come talk with us at our booth, either to learn about SparkPost or tell us about their experience. I greatly enjoy interacting with the SparkPost community. Introducing them to our product and helping them solve problems is really rewarding for me.

There were a few memorable interactions. Some people just wanted to tell us that they really liked our API, both with regard to its quality and ease of use. A few people came to us with questions regarding getting started with SparkPost, but we were able to resolve their issues quickly, even when it involved DNS setup or learning how to use the Postman collection. Other people just wanted ideas on how SparkPost would be useful to them, and it was great to see the light bulb come on when we talked about features like personalizing templates to engage a user with focused content. Regardless, I love it when I can not only solve a problem, but see my work make a difference to people.

We gave out a lot of fun stuff including the very popular Sparky socks with the Wheel o’ Swag, and some lucky attendees won an entry into our Surface Laptop giveaway. If they weren’t lucky on the wheel, attendees could also enter by creating a SparkPost account and sending one of our booth staff an email through the SparkPost API. We had a lot of folks register and send entries, but there could only be one winner: David Nordstedt.

There were some awesome sessions during the week. I especially enjoyed the sessions on using Visual Studio with OS X. The Azure sessions also showed some amazing innovations that Microsoft is making in the way that developers interact with the cloud. Paul Yuknewicz of Microsoft gave a great session on Azure diagnostics and the new tools that have been introduced to Visual Studio to help troubleshoot, debug, and optimize cloud-based applications. The experience is quickly approaching the point where you can do everything locally with confidence that it will translate to Azure production.

The Mouse Can Wait

I had such a great time hanging out with over 1200 passionate developers that Disney World will yet again have to wait until another time. Sorry, Mickey.

If you are running workloads on Azure, be sure to check out SparkPost in the Azure Marketplace, and take a look at our repository on Github.

Also, don’t forget that you can get yourself a cool set of Sparky socks by signing up for your own SparkPost account and sending your first email!

—Nick Zimmerman
Senior Site Reliability Engineer

 

Why We’re Excited for Twilio Signal

1) Love talking about how bots, WebRTC, and IoT are changing the way we communicate? We do too! Not only do we love talking about it, we love developing apps and bots that help us communicate better (or at least in more fun ways), both as a company and with our community. We’d love to hear what you’re doing that’s different and cool.

2) We want to show off our Zap. Let’s get real. APIs are the star of this event, with Twilio’s coming out on top. We’ve recently linked SparkPost and Twilio, because they really are better together. With this Zap, every new SMS message received by your chosen Twilio message will automatically trigger an email notification from SparkPost.

3) Our killer limited edition client library stickers. We’ve got 8 awesome client libraries to show off, and now the stickers to go along with them! From the famous elePHPant to the purplish hues of Elixir, we’ve got one for each of them. Choose your language and represent with pride!

4) Last but not least, we want to meet you! The thing we love most about conferences is being able to meet all of you face-to-face and get direct feedback on what you love about SparkPost, as well as what we could be doing better. Our product is better because of your ideas, and we want to hear them!

So come find us Tuesday and Wednesday, May 24-25, in the expo hall. We’ll be there from 8:00 am – 7:30 pm both days. Come on by to talk shop, grab some new swag, pick up the sticker to represent your client library pride, and get a tour of the latest features.

Can’t make it to Twilio Signal? You can still build awesome things with the SparkPost API! Be sure to check out our client libraries, support docs, and more resources at the Developer Hub, and don’t forget to join our community Slack group! We hope to see you at an event in the near future.

-Mary
@mary_grace
Community Manager, SparkPost