Let's Resonate Blog

We botched up our push notifications yesterday - Wednesdays are earmarked for Resonance Shared Ten - the top ten songs being shared across the Resonance social music network and Thursdays are Throwback Thursdays - essentially a trip down the memory lane. 

Folks might have seen Throwback Thursdays notification on Wednesdays and wondered if Resonance had gotten into the time machine business (assuredly, we haven’t). We’d like to explain how we do things at Resonance and what caused this blip yesterday. 

We wrote earlier about the method to our push notification madness - how our curators select songs and playlists for daily push notifications for the customers. While that blog post highlights the music selection part, it doesn’t talk about all the other pieces of machinery that convert the curated song to a push / email notification on the customer’s device. 

Existing Workflow: Till yesterday, we had a list of songs in a file on a share and every day, yours truly would:

• add the day’s push notification to a tool
• send the notification to test devices 
• verify that the notification looked and seemed correct
• run a tool that would retrieve all the users from our users database and send them this verified push / email notifications  

While this seemed to be working okay for the customers, it had a number of issues on our side - it required manual work every day to reliably send the push notification - work that could be automated and was keeping us away from building additional goodies in the App. It also meant that the few folks (read the founder) that are actively developing Resonance full time every day could not take a break without our users getting impacted (and we do love our vacations :))

New Workflow: So we automated the push notification mechanism - how? 

• We created a schedule table that serves as our push notification song and playlist push notification schedule database ( no more copy and paste from the push notifications file)
• We also created a delivery table, that recorded every push notification that was sent to the customers (audit push notification issues)
• We wrote custom logic that would switch us from an active push notification verification model to a passive push notification verification model - instead of the workflow of sending a push notification, verifying and then sending to all users, we installed a workflow where the next day’s push notification was sent to the test devices a day in advance and would be sent to the customers on schedule - thus requiring manual intervention only when there is something incorrect in the test run. 
• We put this all together on our mac server and installed a cron job to run a few times a day to send the push notifications to the users. 

So what caused the glitch? When we installed the system yesterday and sent the yesterday’s notification, we did it around 4PM pacific time, which meant that the UTC date had changed to the next day - so it picked up the next day’s notifications and sent them as well (we do need to fix this in code to not do so again). Sigh! we did try and work around this but somehow still ended up with the glitch. 

Anyways, letting you folks know why you got the Throwback Thursday notification on a Wednesday and requesting some patience during this glitchy time as this new system finds its groove. Hopefully, the Friday’s notifications would work fine. 

Now that our time has been freed up from this daily manual chore, we’d be bringing some new updates to the App at a faster cadence - Stay tuned!