^Technical

Code Challenge: The SendGrid Event Webhook + Firebase

_{SendGrid Team

January 6, 2015 • 1 min read}

Creating a Real-Time Email Event Feed

There was a bit of a break in my 15 Days of Code Challenge over the holidays, but I’m back to finish the last three. Today, I’ve created a real-time email event feed by using SendGrid’s own Event Webhook, Firebase, and a couple other tools. Check out the tutorial below.

I use a Mac and wanted to showcase an easy way to get the real-time feed of what’s happening with my email. I thought it would be interesting to create a native Mac application that sits in the OSX menu bar right next to the clock.

What I want:

As soon as I click on the Icon, it drops a real-time feed of updating events happening on my emails.

How can I do that?

By getting the following pieces together, I can create the feed I want:

SendGrid Event Webhook
Firebase
Google Compute Engine
OSX menu tray application

SendGrid Event Webhook

The SendGrid Event Webhook sends your application data when any of the below events are generated:

Firebase

Firebase is a platform that lets you build real-time mobile and web apps. Whenever you update its storage it syncs those changes across all devices.

Google Compute Engine

Create a quick application in the google cloud that gets the event webhook data from SendGrid and pushes it into Firebase:

Finished Product: OSX App

Once our data gets pushed into Firebase, we need to sync across other applications to get a real time feed. So I created an OSX status bar application, whose menu items are automatically generated from real time events that get pushed into firebase.

I created a video below to showcase how this works: