Session is a private messenger that uses the decentralized network to securely store and route messages.

Session Notifier

After building the first Session JavaScript SDK, a person contacted me on freelance and requested me to build a REST API that would allow anyone to programmatically send messages via clearnet webhooks. The project was called Session Notifier and it combined a simple webhook API, a Dockerized Kata Containers environment and a monero payment gateway for paid plans. Each user could make a free Session account managed by botfather. To prevent spam and abuse we also made a reporting system that alerted admins with a customer name when their bot was reported by a user. To admin the system I built a web admin dashboard with React and Next.js, a special Session admin bot and a CLI powered by Bun and TypeScript. I wrote docs using mkdocs and documented the REST API using Swagger. The custom payment gateway I built from scratch allowed us to poll the Monero blockchain directly and distribute the incoming transfers.

Building a serverless platform for developers

One of many challenges I faced was to build a powerful and secure platform for developers to run JavaScript code in a serverless environment. This would allow them to embed any custom logic while saving on infrastructure costs.

Session.email

Another service we launched was Session.email — a super simple paid tool to accept Session messages via email. To use it, you just had to take your Session ID and append @session.email to it. To try it out, you could send a few test emails from the landing interface, but to use it in production you had to pay a small monthly fee. The previously built payment gateway was reused for this service as well.