Twilio Engineering Blog

Visualizing the Heartbeat of Twilio

Nina Mehta — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Voxlineas is a live visualization of phone calls being made on Twilio. We built this as a way to show the heartbeat of one call and of all calls being made on API in context of each other. This data...

Adventures in Unicode SMS

Chad Selph — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 00:00:00 GMT

I remember one of my first weeks as an Engineer at Twilio, I tried to send Unicode chess pieces to my phone. I was disappointed to see the characters not come through to the handset. Perhaps just as bad, when...

Introducing Flask-RESTful

Ryan Horn — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 00:00:00 GMT

When we discuss ‘scale’ at Twilio, usually the conversation is about a system’s ability to handle growing amounts of work and how we might expand infrastructure to satisfy increasing demand. But, there is much more to 'scale' than adding servers...

Becoming an Engineer

Renee Chu — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 00:00:00 GMT

I started working as an engineer at Twilio this summer. It’s my first engineering job, and I love creating internal tools that make our business more efficient. However, I didn’t start out as a computer science undergrad, and I hadn't...

Building Twilio Client for Android

Brian Tarricone — Thu, 17 May 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Building software for a client-side device is quite a bit different than building for the cloud. In the cloud, deployment intervals are measured in days, and sometimes hours. But when you're installing software to potentially millions of users' devices, upgrade...

Open Sourcing BankersBox

Chad Etzel — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 00:00:00 GMT

At Twilio, we like to play with new and fun technologies. One technology we have been exploring recently is client-side storage in web applications. There are a few available options, but the one that has gained the most adoption in...

Don't Skimp on Documentation

Kevin Burke — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 00:00:00 GMT

When you build a product for technical users, documentation is extremely important. If people can't figure out how to use your product you won't have any users no matter how amazing your product actually is. Poor documentation will increase the...

Scaling High-Availability Infrastructure in the Cloud

Evan Cooke — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 00:00:00 GMT

As more and more of the services we use every day move online and into the cloud, the design and operation of highly-available infrastructure is becoming increasingly critical. However, downtime is common even at the biggest sites on the Internet....

APIs are for human beings (too)

Frank Stratton — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Computers don’t care about API design. Convenient serialization formats, sane parameter names, and a RESTful interface mean nothing to a robot. These aspects of an API are not meant for a machine, they’re meant for you – the developer. APIs...

Scaling Twilio

Evan Cooke — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 00:00:00 GMT

On Sept 22nd, 2011 at the first Twilio we had the opportunity to share details on how the engineering team has scaled up the Twilio infrastructure and organization over the past three years. Embedded below are the slides from...

Making a Local Web Server Public with Localtunnel

Progrium — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 00:00:00 GMT

This week we thought we’d share some background on localtunnel, a project I wrote outside of Twilio to help deal with the challenges of developing against webhook-based APIs (such as Twilio’s) when coding behind a NAT. These days it’s fairly...

Why Twilio Wasn’t Affected by Today’s AWS Issues

Evan Cooke — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Starting early this morning, Amazon Web Services experienced several service problems at one of its east coast datacenters. The outage impacted major sites across the Internet. The number of high profile sites affected by the issue shows both the amazing...

Hullo Twilio Engineering Blog

Evan Cooke — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Ahoy hoy and welcome to the newly minted Twilio engineering blog! We the Twilio engineering team will be sharing some of the unique challenges we face bridging the 100-year-old world of realtime telecom with the world of HTTP and the...