May 2019 Summaries

To send images on WhatsApp using PHP, users need to have a Twilio account activated with a WhatsApp sandbox channel and install the Twilio PHP SDK. They must also create a folder named "demo" and copy specific lines of code into a file called "twilioWhatsAppMessaging.php". The code uses environment variables from a ".env" file to authenticate with the Twilio API, allowing users to send WhatsApp messages with image attachments. By following these steps, users can test their PHP application's ability to send WhatsApp messages with images attached, and they can access the full code on GitHub for further development.

In this post, the author demonstrates how to verify phone number ownership using Twilio Verify in an ASP.NET Core Identity application. The process involves sending a verification code to the user's phone number via SMS and checking if the provided code is correct. If the code is correct, the user's phone number is confirmed and stored in the database. The author uses version 2 of the Twilio Verify API, which allows for easier integration with ASP.NET Core Identity. The post provides a step-by-step guide on how to implement this functionality, including setting up the Twilio account, installing the necessary NuGet packages, and creating the required Razor Pages. The author also highlights some possible improvements that can be made to the implementation, such as adding a link to the verification page and displaying the verification status in the app.

In order to store Flex recordings in a location controlled by the customer, customers can use Twilio Functions and Amazon S3 to create a custom solution. This involves enabling WFO, creating a plugin that calls a Twilio Function when recording is complete, and setting up a Proxy Service to play back the recordings. The Proxy Server acts as a middleman, retrieving and decrypting the recording, and returning an audio stream over the HTTP protocol as a response. While this solution works for proof of concept purposes, it may need further extension to be suitable for production environments, such as adding Access Control and handling deletion of original recordings.

Twilio has announced the general availability of its Voice Recording Encryption feature, which provides an additional layer of security for customer call recordings. This feature is designed to protect sensitive information in recordings, such as those used for training, compliance, and dispute resolution. With Voice Recording Encryption, businesses can control who accesses their recordings by using public and private keys, ensuring that only authorized individuals can listen to the contents of the recording. The feature is included with Twilio's Enterprise Edition, but for non-Enterprise customers, it costs $0.015 per minute of encrypted recording time. To get started, users must generate a key pair, submit their public key to Twilio, store their private key securely, enable the feature, and decrypt recordings using their private key.

The summary highlights how using HttpClientFactory with Polly in .NET Core 2.1 enables more resilient service-to-service communications by applying resilience policies to requests from the HttpClient, making it easier to handle failed responses and providing a convenient way to select the right policy for a given request. The changes allow for cleaner code, reduced complexity, and improved reliability, enabling developers to build more robust applications with less effort.

The application verifies phone numbers in Symfony 4 using Twilio's Authy API. It captures users' phone numbers during registration and sends a verification token via SMS. The user must enter the code to verify their number, and if correct, it saves the details into the database after ensuring that they are not false or fraudulent registrations. The application also includes features such as login, logout, and secure areas for authenticated users. It uses Symfony's security component to handle authentication and authorization.

Twilio Champions Program`, a program that recognizes developers who inspire and equip their communities using `Twilio`, was announced by `Twilio` in 2019, with one of its champions being `Chloe Condon`, a senior developer advocate at `Microsoft`. Chloe is known for her expertise and advocacy on topics such as `Azure Functions` and her personal use of communication tools like `Talkspace`, an app that allows users to communicate with licensed therapists. The Twilio Champions Program invites developers to apply or be nominated to join a day-long Summit before SIGNAL, where they will receive content geared towards them and a free ticket to the conference.

The Twilio Community has surpassed five million developer accounts, indicating a significant growth in the number of individuals building applications with communications APIs using Twilio's platform. These developers have created various innovative apps across different industries, such as combatting forest fires and automating IT alerts. Many users interact with apps built on Twilio without realizing it, including those from Uber, Airbnb, Twitch, and popular brands. To learn more about becoming a Twilio Developer, individuals can sign up for a free account and explore TwilioQuest, a gamified learning platform.

Twilio Champions Program` is an initiative by Twilio that recognizes and supports developers who inspire and equip their communities using Twilio. April Speight, one of the Twilio Champions, is a developer who loves talking about Python and documentation. She has been involved with `SIGNAL` conference in the past and plans to attend again this year where she will participate in pair programming sessions and showcase her projects built with Twilio. The program aims to provide a platform for developers to share their expertise and build communities around Twilio, and offers benefits such as a day-long summit and free ticket to the `SIGNAL` conference.

Samuel Ogundipe provides a detailed guide on creating a text-to-subscribe application using PHP, Twilio, and Laravel, aiming to cater to users without smartphones or regular PCs. The tutorial assumes readers have fundamental knowledge of PHP and Laravel and begins by setting up a Twilio phone number to receive text messages that trigger API actions. It involves extending Laravel's registration form to include a phone number and creating a callback API to interact with Twilio. The guide explains how to verify phone numbers for testing purposes and describes the use of the Twilio SDK to manage subscriptions through SMS commands, such as "subscribe" or "cancel." Additionally, Ogundipe suggests further enhancing the application by incorporating registration via SMS, making it adaptable to various applications. The tutorial's code is available on GitHub, encouraging readers to experiment and expand on the provided foundation.

The developers behind this article have curated a selection of their favorite tutorials and guides for .NET developers, covering topics such as authentication, connection strings, Blazor, and resilient communication between services. These resources are designed to be accessible to both beginners and experienced programmers, providing useful techniques for building web applications with ASP.NET Core and other related technologies.

You learned how to protect your Node.js microservices with an authorization service to control which authenticated and authorized users have access to specific resources. You also learned how to implement two-factor authentication with Twilio Authy, combining it with JSON Web Tokens to form a robust system for authenticating and authorizing your JavaScript APIs.

This summary provides a comprehensive overview of implementing role management with SMS updates in a PHP application using Laravel Bouncer and Twilio SMS. The author, Ogbonna Vitalis, guides the reader through setting up a new Laravel project, configuring authentication, installing the Bouncer package for role management, integrating the Twilio SDK for sending SMS notifications, and assigning roles to users upon registration. The tutorial concludes with a demonstration of how to send an SMS update when a user's role is assigned, highlighting the use of Bouncer and Twilio in a Laravel application.

Twilio has introduced its Champions Program, which recognizes developers who inspire and equip their communities using Twilio. One of the champions is Clement Sauvage, a developer and entrepreneur who shares his thoughts on communication being essential in both personal and professional life. He also talks about his favorite apps that help him focus and calm down, such as SleepCycle, Headspace, and Forest. Clement has attended Signal conferences multiple times, values learning from speakers, playing with new technology, and meeting fellow Twilio enthusiasts. The program invites developers to apply or be nominated to join a day-long Summit before the SIGNAL conference, where they will receive exclusive content and a free ticket to the event.

Twilio has announced that its <Pay> service is now generally available, allowing businesses to accept Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliant payments over the phone without the hassle of building and maintaining their own PCI compliant payment infrastructure. The service enables customers to focus on building a secure voice payment experience while leveraging Twilio's full suite of Programmable Voice APIs. With <Pay>, businesses can build self-service payment processing, augment contact center payment workflows, and limit their PCI scope to save on cost and overhead. The service supports features such as tokenization, automatic pause/resume recording functionality, and built-in validation and retries. It also comes with a pricing model and is available for integration with various payment platforms, including Base Commerce.

Jen Aprahamian is a Technical Program Manager at Netflix who has risen through the ranks from winning fax machines signed by Jeff Ilan at SIGNAL 2017 to presenting Flex during the keynote last year. She emphasizes the importance of communications in her career and personal life, citing its ability to stay connected with people and get work done. Jen loves Ginger, a personal coaching app that provides support via in-app messaging. She has attended SIGNAL three times and looks forward to this year's event, where she plans to connect with fellow Twilio Champions and customers. Jen is part of the Twilio Champions Program, which recognizes developers who inspire and equip their communities using Twilio.

A Java stack trace is an incredibly useful tool for debugging code, showing the call stack and providing information on the methods that were called when an exception occurred. It typically shows the Exception's type and message, followed by a list of method calls in reverse chronological order. To read a Java stack trace, start with the top line (the Exception's details) and scan down to find where the code went wrong. The most recently thrown Exception is on the first line, and the location where it was thrown is still on the second line. When dealing with libraries and frameworks, be aware that they can cause exceptions without explicit throw statements, such as `NullPointerException` or `ArithmeticException`. Catching and rethrowing Exceptions can help shield users from specific error types while adding context and making stack traces easier to read. A good strategy is to jump down the "Caused by" sections looking for your own code, then read that section in detail to isolate the problem. Understanding stack traces improves with practice, and learning how to extract useful information from them makes debugging much less painful.

Authy is a free two-factor authentication (2FA) app that focuses on security for online activities such as banking, buying bitcoin, Tweeting, or streaming on Twitch. The app is free because it's paid for by businesses working with Twilio to ensure users stay protected. These businesses pay for authentications generated by Twilio’s pre-built authentication software, the Authy API. The app offers benefits like multi-device convenience, encrypted backups in the cloud, and easy recovery.

Python programmers have been sharing helpful tutorials on various topics, including building bots for exercise and Slack, using Bokeh for data visualization, and creating their own web frameworks. These resources cater to both beginner and experienced developers, aiming to provide a convenient refresh or learning opportunity. The tutorials cover tools such as Zappa, AWS, Twilio SMS, Django, Flask, and more. Additionally, there is an introduction to Python's new governance model, highlighting the contributions of various developers in the community.

Twilio Flex is a Programmability-based solution used by companies like Scorpion to solve contact center challenges. Scorpion, a full-service digital marketing and technology company, built an in-house contact center solution before deploying Twilio Flex for their agents who field chat inquiries on behalf of businesses nationwide. With Twilio Flex, Scorpion was able to create a custom agent dashboard that surfaces valuable data from their own databases seamlessly within the interface, eliminating the need for their own Redux store management. The company's developer, Josiah, has built a successful instance of Twilio Flex that supports over 10,000 chats per week and is constantly iterating on new features. Scorpion's custom dashboard allows agents to quickly see if the business they are representing is open or closed, showcasing the importance of sweating the details in creating the right customer experience with Twilio Flex.

Lock files in npm and yarn are designed to manage dependencies for applications, but they can cause issues when publishing libraries or CLIs to the npm registry. Lock files list exact versions of dependencies and their nested dependencies, which can lead to different versions being used by developers and users. Publishing a module to npm involves packaging and uploading files, including lock files, which are ignored during installation. To avoid the "works on my machine" effect when publishing libraries, it's recommended to disable lock file generation and use shrinkwrap.json instead, which pins dependencies at a specific version. This approach requires careful consideration, as it may block critical patch fixes.

The author of this article, Stefan Judis, is exploring the possibility of generating an RSS feed from Twilio voice calls. He introduces the concept of "PodBot" - a phone call-driven podcast site where users can make phone calls to generate podcast episodes without needing a microphone setup or audio file storage. To achieve this, the author uses Twilio serverless functions to accept and manage phone calls, recordings, and voice transcriptions. The article provides a step-by-step guide on how to set up these functions using Node.js and Twilio's API, including creating three JavaScript files for call-enter, transcribe-title, and call-exit endpoints. With this setup, users can log information from the phone calls, such as CallSid, RecordingUrl, and TranscriptionText, which can be stored in a database or other stores. The article concludes by explaining how to run these functions locally using twilio-run and connect them with Twilio numbers for incoming calls.

Aws Lambda and Ruby serverless application development is made easier by the Jets framework, which combines the experience of building a Rails application with the ability to deploy to AWS Lambda and related services. To get started with Jets, you can install the `jets` gem globally and create a new project using the `jets new` command. The Jet's controller generator will create a basic structure for your application, including models, controllers, actions, and routes. In this example, we built an SMS-based app that responds to incoming messages with a random dad joke from the icanhazdadjoke API. To deploy the application to AWS Lambda, you need to set up IAM credentials and create a new user with the minimum required permissions. Once deployed, you can test the application using curl or by sending an SMS message to the Twilio number associated with your application URL. The Jets framework makes it easy to build serverless Ruby applications that can run on AWS Lambda.

This tutorial aims to create an OpenCart SMS extension that notifies store owners of new orders, customer registrations, and order history modifications using the Twilio SMS API. It requires a PHP development environment with Composer, a Twilio account, and an understanding of OpenCart's MVC framework. The module is created by modifying existing files and adding new ones, including an admin interface to store Twilio credentials, template files for sending SMS notifications, and an installable module that integrates the Twilio SDK. To test the module, the author installed it on their own OpenCart instance and confirmed that it sent SMS notifications correctly. The tutorial also addresses potential issues with SMS region permissions and permission errors. By following this tutorial, users can create a custom OpenCart module that leverages Twilio's programmable SMS API to enhance their store's notification system.

Upsolve, a tech nonprofit based in NYC, is using technology to provide financial assistance to low-income families who are struggling with debt. The organization's goal is to put power back in these families' hands through the bankruptcy process, which can help them wipe their financial slate clean and improve their credit scores. Upsolve uses a guided online web application that reviews users' forms before sending them to staff attorneys for review, providing automated SMS notifications throughout the process to build trust and increase transparency. The organization has already helped relieve over $30 million in debt for 500 families across the US and is scaling its service fast, with plans to help 2,000 families complete the bankruptcy process in the next year.

Tech communities in Austin, Texas have been thriving this spring, with events like Women's History month's git hired --f "Women and Non Binary Humans in Tech" and the LonghornPHP conference. These gatherings provided valuable skills training, mentorship, and networking opportunities for attendees from diverse backgrounds. The Austin community demonstrated generosity and inclusivity, with mentors supporting each other and attendees offering encouragement and tips to one another. This sense of camaraderie was also evident at events like HackOut, an LGBTQ hackathon, which fostered creativity, collaboration, and mutual empathy among participants. With a focus on diversity and inclusion, these tech communities are helping to build trust and welcoming environments for underrepresented developers.

A Twilio Function can be used to make web requests from an iOS application without having to maintain a server. In this tutorial, a simple hard-coded Pikachu joke is returned by a Twilio Function, which is then called from an iOS app using `URLSession`. The iOS app parses the response data as JSON and displays the first joke on a label. To test the function, the URL path of the function can be visited in a web browser to verify that it returns the expected output. This tutorial demonstrates how Twilio Functions can simplify mobile app development by abstracting away server-side complexities.

Today we are excited to announce that Salesforce Flex CTI is now Generally Available, supporting both Salesforce Classic and/or Lightning, and is included at no extra cost within the Flex license. This integration enables omnichannel customer communications in Sales and Service Cloud, allowing for automatic search and screen pop, contextual information presentation to agents, single sign-on authentication, and more. Users can access Flex via Salesforce's openCTI utility bar component, which also supports dual monitors for a seamless experience. The integration is now available for setup through the admin interface or detailed documentation, with beta users able to migrate to the GA version easily.

Twilio and Salesforce have partnered to enable nonprofits to engage with volunteers, donors, and constituents via SMS, providing a transformative way of communication. The partnership allows nonprofits to leverage the most ubiquitous channel for global communication, text messaging, which is inclusive and enables cross-cultural connections. With Twilio for Salesforce, nonprofits can install and configure the app in just a few minutes, no custom code required, and access features such as Bulk Message Builder, Two Way Messages, group inbox, and Process Builder to facilitate conversations, track message delivery, and automate critical messages. The platform also includes 15 standard reports to save time in reporting activity and results.

To send emails in Node.js with the SendGrid API, first set up a development environment by installing Node.js and npm, creating a free SendGrid account, and setting an API key as an environment variable. Then, install the SendGrid helper library for Node and create an `index.js` file to use the SendGrid API to send emails. The code can be run using the `node index.js` command to verify that it works correctly, allowing developers to easily integrate email sending into their Node.js applications.

Twilio's APIs enable communication through various channels, and when events such as incoming messages or calls occur, Twilio makes an HTTP request to a server provided by the user, known as a webhook. A Spring Boot app can be created to respond to these webhooks, and in this example, it plays a caller a short message followed by the Rogers and Hammerstein song "It Might As Well Be Spring". The project requires Java 8 or higher, Ngrok, and a Twilio account. The Spring Initializr is used to create a new project, and the WebhookController class holds the code for the webhook. The controller uses the Twilio helper library to generate TwiML, which is sent back to Twilio as the response to the webhook. To develop webhooks, Ngrok provides an internet-accessible URL for development environments, and once set up, a Twilio phone number can be configured to use this URL as its webhook address. The app responds with TwiML created in the controller class, playing a greeting and music to the caller. For a more reliable solution, the Spring documentation recommends deploying applications to cloud platforms.

Node.js provides various logging solutions, including console.log and console.error, which differ in how they handle output. Understanding the underlying technology is essential for effective logging. Node.js has a built-in ecosystem that allows developers to use libraries like pino, winston, roarr, and bunyan to ship logs efficiently without cluttering the user's console. These libraries offer features such as log levels, filtering, and transports that can be used to transform or prettify logs for better readability. For library development, using a middleware approach allows consumers to enable or disable logging as needed. Additionally, tools like chalk and pino-debug can help format and display debug logs in a more readable format. When building a CLI with Node.js, it's crucial to consider scenarios where the output might be redirected or run in CI mode, and to use libraries that handle these situations accordingly.

The tutorial covers creating a real-time polling app using Twilio Sync and Laravel PHP, focusing on extending Laravel's default broadcast driver to use Twilio Sync for real-time updates. It involves building a Voting component with Chart.js to visualize poll results, creating a Candidate model and migration, defining routes and controller actions, and implementing event broadcasting with Twilio Sync. The application allows users to cast votes in real-time, and the changes are reflected across multiple browser tabs.

This post demonstrates how to use a database as a persistence layer for a JavaScript microservices application. The authors show how to use Netflix Eureka and Netflix Zuul for service discovery and load balancing, and how to add a cloud-based MongoDB Atlas database as a persistence layer. They provide a hands-on introduction to working with MongoDB Atlas and demonstrate how to scale the services by adding new instances to the system. The post also covers how to update services while maintaining 100% system uptime, using a persistence layer that stores data in a shared database.

Here's a neutral and interesting summary of the text in one paragraph: Fast Forward, a Twilio.org partner, has been accelerating tech nonprofits for five years, connecting them with resources to achieve positive social impact at scale. With 41 accelerations under its belt, Fast Forward has impacted over 51 million lives globally, raising $102 million in philanthropic funding. These organizations have diverse founders, often solving problems they personally experienced, and face unique challenges running tech startups and nonprofits. To overcome these hurdles, tools like Twilio's Programmable Voice API and technical volunteering support are crucial. By leveraging such resources, tech nonprofits can deliver life-changing support to underserved communities, with examples like TalkingPoints and Tarjimly showcasing the impact of partnerships and volunteer efforts.

The Twilio SendGrid API is a great solution for sending emails programmatically in Python, and with this tutorial, you can set up your development environment and start sending emails using the SendGrid library. To get started, you need to create a SendGrid account, create an API key, and install the SendGrid Python library. Once you have these set up, you can use the provided code to send an email in Python, which involves importing the necessary libraries, creating a message object, and sending it using the `SendGridAPIClient`. The tutorial also touches on how to process and respond to incoming emails using SendGrid's Inbound Email Parse Webhook and other features.