Home > Experiments > Boomerang: Webhook after xx time
Oliver Nassar

Update: 27 February 2022

Due to abuse, I've had to put authentication in front of this API endpoint. Please email me if you'd like access: onassar@gmail.com

Boomerang: Webhook after xx time

October 2021

While building Iconduck, I ran into a common situation: I wanted to email users after 24 hours to get feedback on what they thought.

I didn't want to create a cron (I loathe crons). So I thought a low-tech approach would be to have some 3rd-party service hit an endpoint of mine after 24 hours. Something like:
https://website.com/send-user-123-a-welcome-email.

I assumed there would be some 3rd party service that would facilitate this, but no luck. So, I built my own, low-tech webhook service using AWS API Gateway and AWS Lambda.

Here is a sample endpoint: 

wget https://aws-api.416.io/boomerang/v1/track/in-24-hours/https://your-url-here.com/

The above does exactly what you'd expect it to: in 24 hours, it will make a request to https://your-url-here.com/. It's that simple.

I use Sugar, a JavaScript library, for parsing the date and time strings. It's pretty solid. Anything that Sugar can handle (eg. "in 4 hours", "tomorrow at 8am"), Boomerang (my codename for now) can handle.

Here are a bunch of date / time strings that have been tested and work:

How was it built?

I use AWS to facilitate the backend of this tool. Three different services are used:

As mentioned, Sugar is used to facilitate interpretation of datetime strings to their corresponding unix timestamps.

Feedback

If you'd like to use the above endpoints in a production environment, or have any feedback, you can reach me at: onassar@gmail.com