TextBelt VS Zulip

I doubt you'll find a free SMS texter. Textbelt seems to be low-hassle and open-source. There's an option for standing up your own server to make it "free". I'd look into email options as well. It looks like most carriers support some kind of email-to-text path.

I use paid service textbelt.com (also www.twilio.com is there), they have standard plugin for many languages.

# Path: lib/sms_demo/sms_handler.ex defmodule SmsDemo.SmsHandler do use GenServer def send_message(to_phone, message) do GenServer.cast(SmsDemo.SmsHandler, {:send, {to_phone, message}}) end def receive_message(from_phone, message) do GenServer.cast(SmsDemo.SmsHandler, {:receive, {from_phone, message}}) end def start_link(_) do GenServer.start_link(__MODULE__, [], name: __MODULE__) end def init([]) do {:ok, %{}} end def handle_cast({:send, {phone, message}}, state) do textbelt_url = "https://textbelt.com/text" textbelt_key = Application.get_env(:sms_demo, :textbelt_key) replyWebhookUrl = Application.get_env(:sms_demo, :webhook_url) params = %{ phone: phone, message: message, key: textbelt_key, replyWebhookUrl: replyWebhookUrl } HTTPoison.post(textbelt_url, Poison.encode!(params), [{"Content-type", "application/json"}]) {:noreply, state} end def handle_cast({:receive, {phone, message}}, state) do # TODO: Do something with the message {:noreply, state} end end

I was recently introduced to the SMS service TextBelt which is a pre-pay and simplified service to provide the ability to send and receive SMS messages from code.

I was looking into some side project ideas and stumbled upon one called textbelt where the guy uses something like twilio in the backend and sell 10x per SMS. It is kinda arbitrage for SaaS products. This guy is legit and also has 5 to 10K $ per month stripe verified indiehackers project. More over he doesn’t even promote his product and moved on. Yet this is so popular enough to bring in 5k a month. Do you guys think its possible to reinvent something like this and promote to make a worthwhile side project ?

You can look into this: https://github.com/typpo/textbelt

Can your monitoring system run shell scripts and curl in response to events? If so you could use a service like Textbelt to send SMS messages from it.

Zulip — Real-time chat with a unique email-like threading model. The free plan includes 10,000 messages of search history and File storage up to 5 GB. also, it provides a self-hostable open-source version.

(1) Zulip Chat - https://zulip.com/ - seems to be reasonably popular, but more people should know about it

I’ve been using it for over 5 years now [1], and it’s as good as ever. It’s way faster than any other chat app I’ve used. It has a good UI and conversation model. It has a simple and functional API that lets me curl threads and write blog posts based on them.

(only problem is that I Ctrl-+ in my browser to make the font bigger – I think it’s too dense for most people)

(2) re2c regex to state machine compiler - https://re2c.org

A gem from the 90’s, which people have done a great job maintaining and improving (getting Go and Rust target support in the last few years). I started using it in 2016, and used for a new program a few months ago. I came to the conclusion that it should have been built into C, because C has shitty string processing – and Ken Thompson both invented C AND brought regular languages to computing !!

In comparison, treesitter lexers are very low level, fiddly, and error prone. I recently saw dozens of ad hoc fixes to the tree-sitter-bash lexer, which is unsurprising if you look at the structure of the code (manually crawling through backslashes and braces in C).

https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter-bash/blob/master/...

These fixes are definitely appreciated, but I think it indicates a problem with the model itself.

(based on https://lobste.rs/s/endspx/software_you_are_thankful_for#c_y...)

[1] https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2018/04/26.html

A few more truly in the vibe of open source projects not advertising their hosting providers: https://plane.so/ , https://element.io/ , https://www.loomio.com/ , https://zulip.com/ , and it keeps going... Very few open source projects, in the FOSS sense, are advertising their hosting provider.

I was so excited to see this happen!

I'm not a customer of yours, but your blog posts inspired me a lot. Your journey through quitting caffeine is a great and heartening read.

I've got two things to say;

1) Will you consider source-availabling the web portal (app.keygen.sh) too? Some enterprises could use it for easy management/support for custoner's licenses. Although now that I think about it, it could also discourage custom, more suitable implementations for each use-case... I'm torn on this one. I would like to see it available on GitHub too just out of curiosity too. It's very beautiful.

2) For a team + customers' chat, I cannot recommend Zulip enough. It's a joy to use and has the most innovative chat system I've ever seen. https://zulip.com

I hope your business keeps prospering!

Zulip | Senior Flutter Engineer | REMOTE or San Francisco | Full-time | https://zulip.com/

At Zulip, we’re out to build the world’s best collaboration platform, and we’re committed to keeping it 100% open source. Zulip is the only modern team chat app that is designed for both live and asynchronous conversations. Our product serves as the communication hub for businesses, open-source projects, educators and communities around the world.

We're building the next generation of Zulip's mobile apps in Flutter. We're looking for a senior engineer with Flutter experience to join our small core team and help define the future of team chat. Our Flutter prototype is just a few months old, so this is a greenfield opportunity to help shape the app's architecture from early on.

For full details, check out https://zulip.com/jobs/. Apply at [email protected].

Anyways, I'm an internet stranger, not a social media expert. So let me know what you all think. And if we make a discord or zulip or something to make this a reality, let me know and I'd love to help any way I can.