What is Nylas, why did I join and why should you care?

I joined Nylas around four months ago as their first Senior Developer Advocate. It might seem like a short amount of time, but in the startup world, time moves differently.

What is Nylas?

In a nutshell, Nylas is a set of APIs that allows you to easily connect with any email, calendar and contacts provider without having to go through a lengthy and complex configuration process.

In other words, we do the heavy work so you can focus on your business.

When it comes to Email, we offer “One Email API for Every Provider”. This means our Email API is universal and you can connect to various providers without having to write specific code for each. Also, we provide real-time, bi-directional sync, and full CRUD capabilities. If you want to learn more, just go to our Universal Email API page.

When it comes to Calendar, we offer the same capabilities as our Email API, but also conferencing sync, events metadata, and programmatic webhooks. If you want to learn more, just go to our Universal Calendar API page.

When it comes to Contacts, you can create, update or delete contacts in any supported provider. If you want to learn more, just go to our Universal Contacts API page.

With Email, Calendar, and Contacts APIs, we’re just getting started. Check out what we offer on top of these APIs to give developers even more power.

With Neural API, exploring the world of AI and ML is easy, with ready-made models that can be used to clean conversations, extract signatures, perform OCR, and run sentiment analysis. If you want to learn more, just go to our Neural API page.

Nylas Streams is our ETL solution that requires little to no code to transform and consume communications data for E-Commerce, Sales, Fintech and Customer Success. If you want to learn more, just go to our Nylas Streams page.

Scheduler, a full featured scheduler with customizable UI. If you want to learn, just go to Scheduler.

Components, ready made and fully flexible UI/UX widgets ready for immediate use. If you want to learn more, just go to Components.

Why did I join?

The first thing that caught my attention with Nylas was the fact that they provide APIs to make communications easier. Handling Email, Calendars and Contacts gives a lot of space to create amazing applications.

The second thing that attracted me to Nylas was the company culture. Everybody looked committed to each other, as I saw a lot of internal support when the Nylas account posted something on social media, and also my interviews were more like chatting with friends than actual interviews.

The third and probably most important thing for me, was going back to Developer Advocacy, which is something that I’m really passionate about. Being able to share with the community is something that makes me feel good and that makes me a better person and a better developer.

Obviously, those 3 things might not be enough to convince you, so let’s create a small example.

For this I’m going to choose one of my favorite Programming Languages– R. And while I’m not an R professional or expert, I’m very passionate about it, so bear with me, there might be better ways to do this.

What we are going to do is simply read the first three messages in my inbox and print the subjects.

The result is going to be:

A Nylas email 

Invitation: RRSP Webinar @ Tue Feb 8, 2022 1pm - 2pm (EST) (alvaro.t@nylas.com) 

Start here: Welcome to Clockwise

Obviously, while R is an awesome language used by statisticians and data scientists around the world, it is not a mainstream language.

That’s why Nylas provides us with SDKs for Python, Ruby, Node, and Java.

Let’s see how we can read our inbox using the Python SDK. If you want to learn how to install the SDK, read our Python Documentation.

The result is going to be:

A Nylas email 

Invitation: RRSP Webinar @ Tue Feb 8, 2022 1pm - 2pm (EST) (alvaro.t@nylas.com) 

Start here: Welcome to Clockwise

As you can see, using the SDK is easier, because we don’t need to traverse the JSON response or figure out where the element that we want to print is. Also, if something changes internally we can rest assured that the SDK will be updated to reflect any changes while simply calling the API will require some manual work. And the same goes for Calendar, Contacts, and the rest of our offerings.
Why should you care?

Well, to begin with, I’m your friendly Developer Advocate so you know I’m going to provide you with constant and interesting content about the Nylas APIs. Also, signing up for a Nylas account is easy, no Credit Card is required and you can get 14 days to try it out. Ready to go? Just go to https://dashboard.nylas.com/register and follow the instructions.

Also, I’m already working on a series of blog posts that will help you to get started, make your first API calls and in overall, get the full Nylas experience.

You can start by reading my blog How to Send Emails with the Nylas Python SDK

Don’t think Nylas is for you? Well, recommend us to a friend then. You might know someone who could benefit from having fast, easy, and convenient access to universal communication APIs.