Customer Convos: SendBird

This piece is a part of our Customer Convos series. We’re sharing stories of how people use npm at work. Want to share your thoughts? Drop us a line.

Q. Hi! Can you state your name, what you do, and/or what your company does?

A. Hi, my name is James Kim. I am the JavaScript Engineer at SendBird, the chat solution for enterprise mobile and web services, apps, and games. I own and manage the SendBird JavaScript SDK and create our sample Javascript projects with it.

How’s your day going?

My day is going excellent! At the moment, we are hard at work adding new features and making improvements to our current product.

Recently, we’ve added a new feature, the “public group channel.” It allows users to browse and join channels that interest them and become members of them. It’s a mash-up between a private group chat and an open channel — the large scale of an open channel with the moderation, permissions, and members feature of a smaller group chat.

We’re also working to support TypeScript. Since JavaScript doesn’t have an explicit type, some developers using SendBird’s JavaScript SDK may pass the wrong type. But if they use TypeScript, they can validate type at the coding stage. This is a particularly excellent way to reduce mistakes and a good way for developers and cut down on debugging time.

Tell me the story of npm at your company. What specific problem did you have that npm solved?

Sendbird.com and Dashboard are typically our first interactions with many customers and they are critical to our success.  Our website, Dashboard, and all of the webpages we offer need to use various libraries and npm allows us to easily manage those libraries. npm is a necessary and important tool to manage our libraries and save time.

npm helps us to educate our global customers about how to comfortably use our JavaScript SDK. And as we upload our JavaScript SDK to npm, engineers from around the world can access our product. npm serves as one nexus connecting SendBird to our customers.

To people who are unsure what they could use npm for - how would you explain the use case?

As you build your service, you will need to use a variety of libraries. With npm, you need not download all of the libraries and include them in a specific project folder. You can do everything from one place, whether you’re downloading libraries to managing versions. So you shouldn’t hesitate to use npm. 

For these reasons, I am sure that npm is the best way to provide you and your company with an awesome library that can be easily and comfortably accessible for anyone in the world.

How’s the day to day experience of using npm?

On a day-to-day basis there’s sometimes stress around the dirty work of releasing a new version of our product. But with npm, there isn’t any extra work when you release a new version and, honestly, that’s one of its tremendous advantages. npm is the simplest way to deliver the latest version of our library with our newest features to a wide variety of customers around the world.

Would you recommend that another org or company use npm and why?

Yes, of course! If you use JavaScript in any capacity to build a website or you are using React native to create a mobile version of your site, then you’ll run into some difficulties if you’re not using npm.

Let’s say you’re using some service other than npm and you’re looking for each library on your own. Your valiant, though ill-fated, effort will (sorry to say) be a huge waste of your time. With npm alone, you can manage all of your versions and set up libraries with ease. If you deal in anything related to JavaScript, I strongly encourage you to use npm.

Any cool npm stuff your company has done publicly that you’d like to promote?

Anything cool? Of course! SendBird’s JavaScript SDK, which we released on npm, is pretty darn cool and it’s one of our company’s core products. By using our JavaScript SDK, you can add chat or messaging to any web or mobile application you would like. Thousands of customers have used our JavaScript SDK to add chat to their mobile and web application.

As far as I know, we’re the only chat and messaging SDK that supports React native. Many of those web and mobile customers used npm to download our JavaScript SDK and build great conversational products.

We continue to improve and add new features, so be on the lookout for SendBird. If you need to add chat or messaging to your service and haven’t used SendBird’s JavaScript SDK yet, I would recommend testing SendBird out through npm.