As a developer advocate I feel like its my job to be learning new things so I can make them easier for my audience. This constant act of learning can take its toll. And learning for just learnings sake is extremely difficult. But when I am starting with a new piece of technology often there is a bit of work required before I can start feeling confident to do something useful.

Today I am writing about one approach I found extremely useful. Learning while having fun. And the thing I was learning was Ringcentral api. I was looking for a service to send some messages. I am quite familiar with the twilio sdk and have used it for few of my projects before. But I knew Mike Stowe worked for Ringcentral. And I luckily bumped into him at Developer Week 2020. In their platform of learning and engaging with Ringcentral they have gamified the entire process of learning about their tech stack. Points for reading article as well as finding out where to find info if and when I would get stuck. Doing silly little photo challenges all made it enjoyable to do the tasks. The instant gratification of doing something and getting some points for doing it was great.

I tried their Javascript SDK to test out sending a message to my phone and it was as easy as setting a new project up with a few lines of config and voila I had a message to my phone.

They have a good number of language SDKs to choose from.
Getting Started with Starter Code

As of writing this article they did not have docs for Golang. But they do have an SDK. So I can integrate that into my application.

I think I will play with this a bit more. But so far it looks like it does all I need it to do anyway.