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Empower Others. Those words are not just a catchphrase at Twilio. Instead, they have been the foundation of our core values and products since the very beginning.
Twilions know that unleashing human potential — both within our company and throughout our communities — is key not just to our success, but to the greater good we wish to see in the world.
As we’ve grown as a company and our culture evolved, so has our desire to do our part in creating a better, more just world. We saw this with Twilio's commitment as a company to Pledge 1% of our time, equity and funds to doing good.
And we see it in the personal passions of Twilions. Like Kathryn Shirley in Atlanta, who donates her time to the Make-a-Wish Foundation of Georgia, providing Wishes for children with life-threatening, critical illnesses to enrich their human experience. Or Alex Alleyne …
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The internet has an amazingly wide variety of information for human consumption. But this data is often difficult to access programmatically if it doesn't come in the form of a dedicated REST API. With Python tools like Beautiful Soup, you can scrape and parse this data directly from web pages to use for your projects and applications.
Let's use the example of scraping MIDI data from the internet to train a neural network with Magenta that can generate classic Nintendo-sounding music. In order to do this, we'll need a set of MIDI music from old Nintendo games. Using Beautiful Soup we can get this data from the Video Game Music Archive.
Getting started and setting up dependencies
Before moving on, you will need to make sure you have an up to date version of Python 3 and pip installed. Make sure you create and activate …
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It's an exciting time to be a .NET developer as .NET Core 3.0 has reached general availability. With this release comes Blazor, Microsoft's take on building web applications using WebAssembly and the technologies you already know and love such as HTML, CSS, and C#. I published a prior blog post when Blazor was still in active development. It's time to join the release party and share our excitement about Blazor with Twilio and C#.
The first thing you should do when a new product gets announced is tell your friends, right - but what if we phoned them with a special note sharing our excitement? Let's build a web application that does exactly that - it uses Twilio to phone a friend, and is powered by Blazor.
Installing Our Developer Tools
Now in order to follow along - you'll need a few things first. You'll want to grab …
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Almost all applications require users to create accounts on their websites in order to use certain services. This repetitive process of setting up new profiles and creating new passwords for every application is not only time consuming, but frustrating, and over time, account management becomes hard remembering credentials for every application.
Thanks to OAuth, we can use popular social media applications such as Google, Facebook and Twitter to authenticate users. This process makes implementing authentication easier and increases adoption due to existing trust built with the social network. So why not integrate it into your application?
In this tutorial, I will take you through how to integrate Facebook into your Node.js application.
Prerequisites
You will need the following dependencies to complete this tutorial:
Getting Started
Follow the instructions below in your preferred terminal in order to set up your development environment:
$ mkdir …
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How can an organization’s security team defend its customers against threats at scale?
When the Twilio Security Operations team (SecOps) was founded, this challenge weighed heavily on our minds. We knew that automating all our threat investigation and response procedures would be key to safeguarding our customers, but we had no clue where to begin. We also knew that many of our peers were in the same boat.
That’s why today, we’re proud to open-source SOCless: a serverless framework to help organizations easily automate their security workflows and respond to threats quickly and at scale.
To get started with SOCless, visit the documentation at https://twilio-labs.github.io/socless/
Building automated security runbooks
When performing investigations and responding to threats, security professionals follow well-documented, pre-planned, step by step procedures. We call these procedures runbooks.
A typical runbook may require a security professional to use multiple security products, custom scripts, and decision trees to …
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In our day to day activities, we might get too busy for seemingly simple tasks. Too busy to drop a message, check up on loved ones or to remember an appointment. You could solve this by setting alarms right? But what if there was a more efficient way for reminders to send a message to your loved one, or request your lunch at a set time without you having to do it?
In this tutorial, we will learn how to use Twilio’s Programmable SMS to create an SMS reminder system with Laravel. At the end of this tutorial, you would have developed a custom SMS reminder system that alerts your users at a specific time via SMS.
Prerequisites
In order to follow this tutorial, you will need the following:
- Composer installed on your local machine.
- MySQL setup on your local machine.
- Basic knowledge of the Laravel Framework.
- A Twilio …
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It's 2019 and the issue by now seems to be mostly settled: Codes of Conduct, as it turns out, are an important tool for any community to promote inclusion and protect their members from harassment that would otherwise distract them or push them away.
But what's the actual experience of designing one, and more importantly, enforcing one?
I was an admin on lgbtq.technology, a community Slack for LGBTQ+ members of the tech industry, for over two years. It had a couple of thousand members, with several hundred active across scores of channels. It was (and still is!) a vibrant community that brought together fairly wide representation of individuals.
In this article, I'll go over the story of how community management evolved in this particular community. Along the way, I'll share various hard-earned lessons myself and the rest of the admin team there learned about how to effectively manage a diverse …
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PHP is great, but its loosely-typed goodness is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it gives PHP the legendary low barrier to entry, but on the other, magical type juggling inevitably means bugs.
Because PHP is an interpreted rather than compiled language, catching these type problems is tricky, and often they'll go unnoticed for a long time before they catch up with us somewhere down the road. Problems sit and fester in our code base waiting to strike. Unused code can clutter our application, and there is a myriad of other ways in which we write PHP that won't produce errors but are bugs.
There are some excellent tools to help us catch errors and find bugs before we even run our code. IDEs like PhpStorm can inspect our code and give us information on potential problems before a script is ever executed.
Catching problems with our code before …
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The Twilio Programmable Video team is excited to announce that the Track Subscription API is now generally available. Before this release, video participants were automatically subscribed to all tracks. Now, developers can define which participants receive which tracks and control dynamically what end-users see and hear. This new API is available in Group Rooms, Twilio’s solution for multiparty video conferencing.
In this post we outline how we’ve improved the Group Rooms subscription model and share how to get started with the Track Subscription API.
To date, Group Rooms have enforced a subscribe-to-all model. This means that participants automatically subscribe to all the tracks and receive all the audio and video information published to the Room without the choice of opting-out. While this works for most collaboration applications, there are situations where there is an opportunity to provide improved participant experiences. These include:
- Subscribe-to-one: Participants subscribe only to a presenter’s tracks. …
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Though I took two college electives related to artificial intelligence (AI) and have used quite a few machine learning (ML) libraries, I am by no means a ML developer. However, like many developers nowadays, I am extremely curious about ML and TensorFlow, a popular library brought up in many conversations surrounding ML. What exactly is it?
What is TensorFlow?
TensorFlow is an open source library released by Google Brain (now Google AI) in 2015 to make it easier for developers to build, train, and generally work with deep learning models and data to make different types of predictions. You can solve tasks like image classification, natural language processing, generate music as in this Twilio post, and more.
I began playing around with TensorFlow a few weeks ago and though it's been fun and I've learned a lot, here are ten things I wish I'd known before using it.