The Twilio + Heroku Ruby Challenge was a winning application created by Michael Ansel that utilized the instant Ruby platform Heroku and Twilio to provide information about open places on Duke University campus. The challenge aimed to solve the problem of hunger without mobile internet access, allowing anyone to find open places using a call-in application with a specific PIN code. The demo is live on Heroku and the code is available on Github for developers to try out. Additionally, Twilio provides various resources such as API reference documentation, SDKs, helper libraries, quickstarts, and tutorials for different languages and platforms, as well as industry reports, webinars, and a developer community hub called Ahoy.