November 2013 Summaries

By Carter Rabasa, a conference organizer, shipping his first conference was challenging but he learned it's about creating an experience. A year later, he shipped CascadiaJS 2013 in Vancouver, BC, which turned out to be too successful and led him to feel stuck. He then started working on the first-ever Vancouver Dev Week, a week-long celebration of the developer community in Vancouver. Carter emphasizes the importance of having a clear "why" for the event, using an anchor event like CouchDB Conf Vancouver, setting up soap boxes (promoting the event), finding people who want to help, and tying the events together with a game. The event was successful, with over 150 people signing up for the networking game and 1700+ developers attending across all events.

Alex Chen and Jeremy Rubin, two students at MIT, built a Twilio-powered voting system in just under an hour to save HackMIT's event from collapse. The system handled over 240 votes in minutes, providing a smooth experience for participants. With Twilio, they were able to focus on building the app logic rather than worrying about integrating phone functionality, which removed stress and allowed them to work efficiently. The voting process was successful, with clear margins, but had some issues with international participation. The duo credited Twilio for their ease of use, saying it "removed a lot of stress" and enabled them to complete the task quickly.

IHateIroning, a London-based on-demand dry cleaning service, was founded by Matthew Connelly after he realized the hassle and cost associated with traditional dry cleaning methods. The company uses Twilio SMS to communicate with customers and partner dry cleaners, streamlining the process and increasing customer satisfaction. With 80% of new customers becoming regulars, IHateIroning is poised for growth, with plans to raise funding before Christmas to facilitate expansion.

Twilio and Salesforce are being used together to make it possible to communicate with customers directly from a browser, allowing sales teams to save time when chasing leads and managing demos. This integration is made possible by using Twilio Client, WebRTC, and the newly updated SFDC library, enabling features like screen pops and in-browser calling. The combination of Twilio and Salesforce can help support and sales teams work more efficiently, with Coca-Cola Enterprises being a notable example of how this technology has improved their customer service experience.

Twilio will be present at Dreamforce #DF13 with various talks, partner events, and tutorials focused on using communications tools to build a great customer experience and increase sales. Twilio's CEO Jeff Lawson will deliver keynotes highlighting the role of developers in driving innovation through building new apps and companies. The company is also hosting a mini-hackathon with challenges and prizes for developers, as well as showcasing its partners who are innovating communications in the cloud. Additionally, Twilio has updated its SFDC libraries to provide new features such as queue and member support, MMS updates, and more. Developers can meet Twilio's team at the Expo Hall and DevZone throughout the week.

Twilio, a cloud communication platform, is offering technical and financial resources to disaster relief organizations and developers who can provide technical support. The company's goal is to help victims of the Haiyan Typhoon in the Philippines access communication after the destruction caused by the storm. Families are seeking ways to reconnect with each other, while volunteers need tools to coordinate relief efforts. Twilio is providing a platform for these organizations to build and use communications tools that can aid in disaster recovery. The company invites developers and disaster relief organizations to reach out to them for assistance and support.

The Salesforce platform is offering a million-dollar prize for the best Salesforce integration hack at Dreamforce, and has updated its Twilio SFDC Library to support new features such as MMS capability, allowing developers to easily integrate voice and messaging into their apps. The library updates provide a range of tools and resources for developers, including REST API documentation and tutorials, to help them build successful integrations quickly. To get started with the latest Twilio products and Salesforce mobile SDKs, developers can use the updated library in conjunction with other Twilio libraries, such as those for Ruby, Node, or deployment on Heroku.

Alexis Ohanian`, a co-founder of `Reddit`, has written a book called `Without Their Permission: How The 21st Century Will Be Made, Not Managed`, which focuses on harnessing the power of the internet as an open and democratic platform. To enhance his book tour experience, he partnered with `Twilio` to create an app that allows fans to reserve their spot in line via text message. This innovative approach has not only improved the fan experience but also provided valuable data for event planners, enabling them to adjust accordingly. The app has been used by over 1000 people and has allowed for a more relaxed atmosphere at events, with some memorable experiences including students forming connections with each other while waiting in line.

Dropwizard is a Java service framework that provides a simple way to create RESTful APIs and other services, but it can be difficult to deploy in an old-school JEE server. To solve this problem, the authors created WizToWar, a utility library that allows Dropwizard applications to be deployed as WARs for JEE servers. This enables developers to use the benefits of Dropwizard while still being able to deploy their services in traditional JEE environments. The authors chose JEE because they needed to support SIP connectivity, which is only available through JSR-289 APIs, which are integrated with JEE application servers. WizToWar acts as a glue that hooks into the lifecycle of the WAR and initializes the Dropwizard service, making it possible to generate both a normal Dropwizard service and a WAR from the same source. This allows developers to continue using the standard Dropwizard programming model while still meeting integration requirements.

The Guild of Calamitous Intent`, a team of three developers, Imran, Fahm, and Shahriar, won the Rails Rumble's Grand Prize with their app `Rumbler`, which tracks customer feedback by recording and transcribing calls via Twilio Voice and analyzing sentiment. The team built the app in just 48 hours to provide actual value to businesses by visualizing trends and identifying areas of improvement. They prioritized their core feature, focused on integrating Twilio's API, and created a beautiful UI with Fahm's creative design. After being announced as the winner, they received positive feedback and support, and plan to release Rumbler beta in a few weeks.

The Twilio module for Node.js has been updated to include an optional promise interface, which can be used to consume data from the API. This new interface provides several benefits over the traditional callback-based approach, including improved readability and the ability to pass results of asynchronous operations around within an application. The use of promises can help flatten the "pyramid of doom" that can occur with multiple callbacks, making the code easier to read and maintain. While single calls to Twilio may still be best handled using the callback interface, the promise-based approach is particularly suitable for more complex scenarios involving multiple API requests.

Logic Monitor has launched new Twilio usage monitoring capabilities, aiming to help businesses automate data collection and reporting, reducing the time spent on manual tracking of calls, SMS, and other metrics. The new integration allows users to monitor various Twilio dimensions, including total price, SMS, calls, and more, enabling real-time insights into their Twilio usage. The tool was initially developed as an internal solution but has been expanded to meet the needs of businesses, providing a better look at how they're using Twilio in real-time.

You can write an HTTP client to handle various types of failures in production-ready systems. Connection errors can be handled by setting a timeout on the connection request and retrying it if it fails, while closed connections should be treated as 500-level errors. Third-party servers taking too long to respond can be mitigated by assigning a timeout value to external requests and executing fallback logic if the request times out. HTTP level errors, such as non-200 level responses, are generally safe to retry if the request is idempotent. A production-ready client needs to handle these failures properly, and you can test your client using libraries that simulate various types of network failures.