DOers in Action: The OutCall Gives you an Escape from Bad Meetings

DOers in Action: The OutCall Gives you an Escape from Bad Meetings

Sometimes you find yourself in a meeting that you can’t escape from, or perhaps a date that just isn’t going the right direction.

Developer and DOer Abir Majumdar used this dilemma, along with a desire to explore Twilio with Ruby on Rails, as an inspiration to build The OutCall. This crafty web app lets you schedule an incoming call to your phone so you can excuse yourself from any current inescapable situation.

Building The OutCall

When using The OutCall, you can plug in your number and set a time via the Twilio Client web interface or on your mobile phone by sending an SMS message. The OutCall is built using Ruby on Rails and hosted on Heroku. Majumdar uses IronWorker by Iron.io to schedule the call, for styling Twitter Bootstrap, and he used fonts from TypeKit. He also used a Ruby gem called Chronic for the Natural Language date parsing.

More About This Doer

Abir Majumdar has lived and worked in San Francisco for over 11 years. He’s worked as a developer, sales engineer, and product manager at Sharethrough, SAY Media, and Rovi. His interests include listening to and sharing music, going to shows, remembering pop culture minutiae, traveling, technology, dive bars, and ponies. Follow him on Twitter @beersy and on Tumblr.