Texting is one of the most used forms of communication. In the United States alone, 5.5 billion text messages are sent daily. So maybe it’s not so much of a surprise that your customers want to be able to text your business when they need support. Few things are more frustrating than when you’re trying to solve a problem and just end up sitting on hold. And texting offers an alternative for you and your customers.

Sometime last year, we found the opportunity to optimize one of our critical API endpoints that was served using Ruby on Rails. This led to a series of investigations before we identified the right long-term solution for our particular use case. It required us not only to leverage a new JSON serializer, but also challenged us to build efficient caching and deployment strategies to go with it. This is the tale of how we embarked on that compelling journey and what we learned as a result.