Cord's Product and Engineering Blog

  1. A graphic showing chat messages with reactions and the text "What's New? Product Round-Up"

    Changelog
    Holiday Season Product Round-Up | Cord Changelog

    We have a lot to share from our changelog this month, including a translations framework to support both internationalization (i18n) as well as simply changing labels on components, improved Demo Apps with open source code, an update to the Cord privacy model, link unfurling and a CLI command for sending formatted messages. We know - it's a heap of new stuff! Let's unpack it.

    • Product
    • Changelog
  2. Blog cover graphic showing a chat interface powered by React components

    Cord SDK
    React Chat Library

    In a world of AI agents and real-time collaborative software like Figma and Notion, there's never been more reason to get live chat and commenting experiences into your application. The Cord SDK is an excellent choice for building from nothing to a 10/10 chat experience.

    • Engineering
    Jackson Gabbard, Senior Frontend Engineer and Co-founder of CordJackson Gabbard
  3. A graphic showing chat messages with reactions and the text "What's New? October Product Round-Up"

    Changelog
    October Product Round-Up | Cord Changelog

    We have a lot to share from our changelog this month, including a Slack Connect Javascript API, quality-of-life improvements to the Thread and Message APIs, a chatbot that knows the docs of most web technologies (including Cord!), and an entire game built on Cord. Dig in!

    • Product
    • Changelog
  4. A gathering of quizzers at Cord's office

    Event
    Cord Tech Pub Quiz #5

    Our 5th event in the tech pub quiz series. This post documents the event and includes all the questions and answers. It was a wonderful evening of "Aha!" and "Oh... no...". Thanks to everyone who joined us!

    • Engineering
    Jackson Gabbard, CTO and Co-founder of Cord.comJackson Gabbard
  5. Na-na na-na na-na na-na Chat Man!

    What is Cord?
    An SDK for Chat

    Ah, the classic tale of "let's build a chat feature, it'll be easy," said every tech team ever. Spoiler: it's not. This post navigates the labyrinth that is the creation of a chat feature for SaaS applications, emphasizing that while chat may seem like a frivolous addition, it's actually the lifeblood of online collaboration. TL;DR: For most teams, building with a chat SDK or chat NPM package is a much more efficient way to get to a great chat feature.

    • Engineering
    • Product
    A picture of Jackson Gabbard, software engineer for chat, commenting, and other communication featuresJackson Gabbard
  6. Title image with words: August Product Round-Up: Hackathon Edition

    Changelog
    2023 August Product Round-Up

    We just wrapped up a hackathon and (we don’t mean to brag) but our new features make the experience you can build with Cord even better than what you get in Google Docs, Notion, and Figma.

    • Changelog
    • Product
  7. Image of Doug Li in a presence facepile next to the title "Building Collaboration"

    Podcast Transcript
    OpenAI Engineer Doug Li: Yes, We Also Use ChatGPT

    Engineering expert, Doug Li, talks about his experience working at OpenAI, and how it compares to his time at early-Facebook. Listen now to learn how he uses AI in his workflows, what his favorite developer tools are, the last thing he committed to the codebase, and how he predicts AI will evolve over the next decade.

    • Engineering
  8. Web Developers, CSS-in-JS is Ruining Your Product

    Launch Notes
    Migrating from CSS-in-JS to Vanilla Extract

    Developer experience matters. A lot. Unfortunately, CSS-in-JS just doesn't give folks using Cord's SDK the flexibility and speed they need. So we tried something new: Vanilla Extract.

    • Engineering
    A picture of Alberto from EngineeringAlberto Morabito
    A picture of Alberto from EngineeringLudo Fardel
  9. A graphic showing chat messages with reactions and the text "What's New? July Product Round-Up"

    Changelog
    2023 July Product Round-Up

    Our latest batch of components and APIs give customers the power to create seamless commenting experiences on video, canvases, and dashboards, and a way to integrate Cord’s notifications with existing notification systems. Learn more.

    • Product
    • Changelog
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    In Depth
    Building an AI Chatbot with Cord

    In this post, we'll walk through the steps required to craft your own AI-powered chatbot. By the end of this post, you'll have all the core concepts required to understand how to turn your content into a knowledgeable and helpful chatbot.

    • Engineering
    Jackson Gabbard, Cord's CTO and Co-founderJackson Gabbard
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    Launch Notes
    Connect Your Own Slack App With Cord

    Now, with Cord’s APIs and webhooks, you can connect your own Slack app to Cord, and bi-directionally sync comments, shared files, and other changes happening in your product.

    • Engineering
    A picture of Gillian from EngineeringGillian Yeomans
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    Changelog
    2023 June Product Round-Up

    We have some juicy product updates to share that’ll help you drive seat expansion, build a more native UX, and give you more visibility of how users are collaborating in your product.

    • Product
    • Changelog
    Colleen Jiang
  13. An image of a bright white arrow crashing into an exploding maroon star

    Launch Notes
    Not Today, ShadowDOM. Not Today.

    Cord initially embraced the ShadowDOM for its WebComponents, aiming to prevent CSS interference between components and the host page. However, we quickly discovered its restrictive nature, which hindered customization and introduced a steep learning curve for developers. After experimenting with alternatives like CSS variables and CSS Parts, we've reverted to vanilla CSS classnames and open WebComponents, prioritizing developer experience and flexibility over strict encapsulation.

    • Engineering
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    Changelog
    2023 May Product Round-Up

    AI, APIs, and customization are buzzwords in this month's product roundup, with four major updates to explore. Find out what's new with Cord, and what these changes mean for you and your customers.

    • Product
    • Changelog
    Colleen Jiang
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    Team-Led Growth
    Is Collaboration Right For Your Product?

    What's the secret sauce to Figma, Google Docs, and Notion's success? Built-in collaborative features. Other B2B SaaS companies can do the same. Find out how your users will benefit, explore the ROI, and learn more about buying vs. building.

    • Product
    A picture of Sam TierneySam Tierney
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    Expert Insights
    Cord vs. Automerge

    Want to add collaborative features to your product? In this article, we explore the difference between Cord's SDK and Automerge and explain how to determine which is right for you.

    • Engineering
    A picture of Jackson GabbardJackson Gabbard
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    Changelog
    2023 April Product Round-Up

    See what's new with Cord! We’re constantly updating our product to make it better and easier for our clients to implement and customize, and for our clients’ customers to use.

    • Product
    • Changelog
    Colleen Jiang
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    Launch Notes
    Introducing Cord's Notification Components

    Introducing Cord's new components: Notification List and Notification List Launcher. Learn how to use and customise these new features, and why your customers and your developers will love them.

    • Engineering
    Josh Watzman
    Terrence Chung
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    Expert Insights
    How to manage your product roadmap during economic uncertainty

    Need some help understanding how to evolve your product roadmap in the midst of economic uncertainty? Based on his experience as a product manager at Facebook and recent chats with CTOs at multi-billion dollar tech companies, Nimrod Priell, Cord's Co-Founder and CEO, has some tips for you.

    • Product
    an imageNimrod Priell
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    Part 2
    Don't Buy Cord; Build It Yourself

    This is part 2 of the Don't Buy Cord series. In this post, we'll discuss the actual build out of your own collaborative features.

    • Product
    an imageJackson Gabbard
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    Podcast
    Stacked Diffs on GitHub with SPR!

    Until now, the Stacked Diff Workflow was something you could only dream about if your team uses GitHub for code review. Sven Over, a senior engineer Cord, decided it was time for that to change.

    • Engineering
    an imageJackson Gabbard
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    Part 1
    Don't Buy Cord; Build It Yourself

    Don't pay a premium for software that you could just build yourself. Use this guide to build your own collaboration software from scratch.

    • Product
    an imageJackson Gabbard
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    Tech Pub Quiz #3

    Behold! The questions (and answers!) to our 3rd edition of the Cord Tech Pub Quiz. Our largest turn out so far, we had four teams duking it out for the crown.

    • Engineering
    an imageJackson Gabbard
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    Tech Pub Quiz #2

    Listed below are the questions to our virtual Tech Pub Quiz #2 event. We'll continue hosting regular tech quizzes starting in January. For 2021 though, this is our final quiz. Big thanks to everyone who participated! Congratulations again to Josh, Alberto, and Tom for their strong team performance.

    • Engineering
    an imageJackson Gabbard
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    Design stories
    Ben Longden

    Get to know our design philosophy with a quick Q&A with Ben, our brand designer.

    • Product
    Ben Longden
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    Let's kill the coding interview
    Coding Interviews

    Whiteboard coding interviews are fantastic if you want to see a trustworthy, extemporaneous performance of technical problem solving and have a candidate who can show their skills this way. But what about when a great candidate can’t show their skills this way?

    • Engineering
    an imageJackson Gabbard
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    Tech Pub Quiz #1

    Yesterday, we did our first ever tech focused pub quiz. For folks who are curious, here are the questions from our first run! To join future quizzes, shoot me an email jack [ at ] cord [dot] com.

    • Engineering
    an imageJackson Gabbard
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    Multiplexing Websockets with Apollo

    Real-time collaboration demands real-time infrastructure. Doing web-based, real-time interactions efficiently is a hard problem, but we've found a solution that reduces the number of open connections by a factor of 10 or more. TL;DR: We're multiplexing many tabs' network interactions via a single persist websocket.

    • Engineering
    Andrei Gheorghe
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    Work with your team directly in HubSpot with this add-on

    HubSpot is the orange inbound giant that releases a new feature just when we've mastered it. Sure, the platform has a better user experience than other email solutions. But just because it’s all-in-one doesn’t mean there’s only one person involved.

    • Product
  30. In flow and in context
    How to unlock that 10x productivity for your team

    Context switches are a tax on our productivity. And it's a tax we're almost unconscious of. But when we're interrupted to help someone else with their work - or to jump into another app to message someone - it takes us precious time to get back to a productive, creative state of flow. There's ways to avoid that, though, and gain back precious focused time for your entire team. Here's how.

    • Product
    Nimrod PriellNimrod Priell
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    Enabling developer velocity

    Our philosophy is simple: hire smart people, help them move very fast, and good things come as a result.

    • Engineering
    an imageJackson Gabbard
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    Part 2
    Server side tech picks

    This is the second part of a three part series about choosing a technology stack for a startup in the modern (at least as of the time of this writing) world.

    • Engineering
    an imageJackson Gabbard
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    Part 1
    Client side tech picks

    We started Cord in 2020 in the middle of a pandemic. Our mission is building absolutely killer real-time and asynchronous collaboration features that work with any existing SaaS tools. This idea sounds simple enough, but when you dig into what’s required to deliver this, you start to see a lot of unique constraints starting to emerge, which lead us to some very specific technical choices. This post breaks down our choices for the client side of our tech stack. TL;DR: If you just want to know what tech stack we’re running here’s a quick run down. For more detail, see below. We’ve chosen TypeScript for both server and client; modern React with Hooks for the client UIs; GraphQL for the client-server interaction; Apollo on the client and server using WebSockets; React-JSS for managing styles; Webpack + Babel for transpilation.

    • Engineering
    an imageJackson Gabbard
  34. Comparison between sending a mark up using cord, and sending a mark up without cord

    Use Case
    Cord for bug reporting

    Report, assign, and resolve bugs on your landing page or web product faster. Product managers, engineers, and designers alike will thank you.

    • Product
    Nimrod PriellNimrod Priell