Meta account locked in. Time to build the real thing. We went with Ruby on Rails because it’s fast, opinionated, and lets us ship without drowning in boilerplate.

First call: ditch the boring auto-increment IDs. We pulled in sqlite-ulid and set ULIDs as the default keys. They’re globally unique, naturally sortable, and way safer than sequential IDs. No predictable numbers. No easy exploits. Just clean identifiers that scale.

Next up: webhooks. Meta’s system fires events when something happens — like a comment dropping on a post. We wired up a webhook controller, verified it, and caught our first test Comment event. That’s the moment TriggerDM started listening.

For domain modeling, every Instagram entity gets an ig_id. That keeps our ULIDs separate from Instagram’s own identifiers. It’s the glue that lets us call back into their API without losing track of what’s ours.

Final step today: document the fields Instagram sends for Media and Comments. Knowing exactly what data flows in means we can capture it all and turn it into features that matter.

TriggerDM isn’t just code. It’s the engine that will turn comment chaos into automated conversations.

👉 Follow @trigger_dm to watch the build unfold and be first when we launch.