Code is a powerful means of self-expression. Building things because they’re useful is great. Purely ridiculous coding projects are less common but awesome.

In this post, I’ll show you 8 JavaScript projects that will (hopefully!) bring you joy, or at least some mild amusement.

1. Pettier

At a previous company I worked at, an engineer merged a pull request changing 4 spaces to 2 spaces in the entire JavaScript codebase. Hundreds of engineers were stuck in a merge conflict traffic jam, derailing productivity for hours. Good times.

It’s so easy to have opinions about code style at the expense of  substance. Instead of arguing about semicolons, why not convince your team to use Pettier? Taking the nihilistic approach to code style conventions, Pettier randomizes your linter configuration every time you save a file. I’ve gotta say, the project’s naming is spot on. For those not in the know, …

In the five years since acquiring Authy, Twilio has increased its focus on ensuring trust and empowering secure communications between customers and their end users. Meanwhile, Authy continues its mission of providing those end users a secure means of authenticating their identities and actions. Back then, we chose to keep the brands separate, but over the years, as Twilio and Authy converged in their missions, customers and users expressed confusion around the relationship between the two. So, earlier this year we announced that we’re finally going to merge the two brands, renaming the app to Twilio Authy.

What’s in a name?

While the overwhelming response has been of pleasant surprise, there have been those for whom this renaming has caused some confusion and inconvenience. And to those, we just want to say we’re sorry. We understand that you were used to the convenience of Authy being at the …

You may have recently heard: Twilio can now sign BAA (Business Associate Addendum) for HIPAA eligible products – and we know that you have had questions about the process. This post will cover key information about Twilio’s BAA so you have the background you need to get started on building your health and communications use case!

Twilio’s Business Associate Addendum (BAA)

Twilio’s communications APIs make it easy to build communication features and functionality into your software application. Think of Twilio as a bag of specialized interconnecting building blocks, like a set of special LEGO pieces but instead of building vehicles or buildings, you are building communications into your software application. With Twilio, you control the communications that you create, receive, maintain, or transmit on our platform.

When you use Twilio to build communications applications that contain Protected Health Information (PHI), you are using a service provider – Twilio …

This post originally appeared on the Twilio SendGrid blog.

Corporate data breaches have increased by  67% over the past 5 years. And malicious attacks on your company do not come cheap. According to a study by IBM Security, data breaches can cost an average of $8.19M, as well as lead to multiple long term consequences. To guard against these expensive and long-lasting impacts, security against bad actors is more important than ever before.

Data breaches can be especially costly when it comes to email. Because email provides extensive engagement information, you can develop strategic programs around it. When email data is compromised, marketing and product roadmaps can be dramatically impacted.  

IT and security teams highly prioritize the protection of this valuable information. They define and enforce risk mitigation processes, which are put in place to prevent data manipulation and security breaches on your servers. In order to …

Adding Asynchronous Processing to ASP.NET Core 3.1 Razor Pages Applications Built With the MVVM Design Pattern

If you’re building web applications with ASP.NET Core you’re likely to be looking for ways to make them performant as they scale. Using the asynchronous features of C#, ASP.NET Core, and Entity Framework Core is a good way to do this.

Making hot code paths asynchronous is one of Microsoft’s ASP.NET Core Performance Best Practices. A hot code path is one that is “…frequently called and where much of the execution time occurs.”

There are two categories of hot code paths where it’s particularly important to use asynchronous processing in data-driven ASP.NET Core applications:

1. Razor Pages controller actions – the entire call stack is asynchronous, so you can benefit from that by making your controller actions asynchronous.
2. Data access actions – Entity Framework Core includes asynchronous features to improve the performance of code …

Introduction

Laravel is one of the most famous PHP MVC frameworks, largely due to its commitment to modern architecture and active community. Laravel 7, the latest release, has added the coolest new features like Blade-X, Stubs, Cache optimization, and much more.

Pusher is the hosted service that enables developers to add real time data and functionality easily and securely by taking care of all the heavy lifting under the hood.

Laravel supports Pusher integration very gracefully, which makes it very easy for developers to add real-time functionality to their application. In this tutorial, we will be using Twitter APIs to fetch tweets based on a specific hashtag, and create a dashboard to display them in real-time using Pusher.

How does Pusher work?

Pusher uses Channels to provide real-time communication between the server and the client. What are these Channels? Pusher Channels are based on the popular Publish/Subscribe Model. …

Food and photos go hand in hand - if there’s food, then you know there’s going to be an impromptu photoshoot to show it off. There are plenty of apps online that promote the lifestyle of making sure “the camera eats first” on any occasion, no matter where you are.

Completing this tutorial will allow you to apply image recognition on pictures that your friends and family share in WhatsApp.

In this article, we’ll walk you through how you can develop a functional Python program to easily share and identify media content in a private sandbox through WhatsApp using Twilio Programmable MMS, Clarifai API, and Flask.

Tutorial Requirements

In order to build this project, you will need to have the following items ready:

• Python 3.6 or newer. If your operating system does not provide a Python interpreter, you can go to python.org to download an installer. …

In this tutorial we will build a dashboard for receiving Twilio SMS messages on your computer. What we will build here can be a foundation for a custom dashboard project. By the end of the tutorial you will have a web application running on your computer which you can use to check SMS messages on your Twilio phone number.

The dashboard we build will allow us to view all incoming and outgoing messages. Here is how it looks:

Getting set up for this tutorial

There are a few prerequisite steps we need to follow before we begin working through the code.

1. Install Python version >= 3.6 on your computer
2. Set up your Twilio Account
3. Set up your Python virtual environment

We assume that you already have Python installed. We will now walk through setting up your Twilio account and preparing the virtual environment.

Setting up your Twilio Account

If you …

BizHawk is a multi-system emulator beloved by the Tool Assisted Speedrun community for its recording/playback and debugging tools, as well as Lua scripting functionality that can be used for a variety of purposes.

While there is basic documentation describing some of the functions available in these scripts, the lack of working code samples might make it difficult for some to get started. Let's walk through some of the Lua scripting features the BizHawk emulator provides, and have some fun with real examples.

Setting up the BizHawk emulator

BizHawk runs on multiple operating systems, but Lua scripting is only available on the Windows versions. If you are on Mac or Linux, you can use Wine, although setup might be a bit of an involved process depending on which version of which operating system you're using.

There are installation instructions in the README of the project's repository, including an installer …