Congratulations to the winners of the Twilio x DEV hackathon

May 05, 2020
Written by
Reviewed by
Paul Kamp
Twilion

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Over the last month, we hosted a hackathon with our friends at DEV to celebrate the launch of our CodeExchange Community Program. We've been amazed by the amount of excitement and the incredible submissions that we've seen.

In total we've seen over 200 submissions to the hackathon from developers around the world. Today we are excited to announce the winners of the Twilio x DEV April 2020 Hackathon.

Thank you all for participating!

Before we announce the winners, we want to thank everyone who worked on a submission for this hackathon. We are constantly amazed to see what the community builds – and this hackathon was no different. The submissions included everything from apps making life during COVID-19 better, sending SMS from databases, and even using BASIC on a TRS-80.

For this hackathon we had four prize categories:

  • COVID-19 Communications: an app to help folks communicate during this challenging time, either to stay connected or to help resolve COVID-19 related challenges. Examples: Social interaction apps especially for elderly, remote education tools, distribution of supplies to those in need, telemedicine
  • Engaging Engagements: an app that a company could implement to better engage with their customers or to manage their business. Examples: text marketing, fleet management, account notifications, and more -- get more ideas fromthe Twilio website
  • Interesting Integrations: an app that integrates Twilio with at least one other API. Examples: appointment reminder app that uses a scheduling API, sports alert app that uses sports-stat APIs, location-based app that leverages geo-location APIs
  • Exciting X-Factors: an innovative or unexpected app that doesn’t necessarily fit any of the above categories, but is a clear winner nonetheless.

The prizes for each category were the same:

  • $1,500 USD gift card or equivalent 💸
  • Twilio Swag Pack ($300 value) 😎
  • SIGNAL Conference Ticket ($2500 USD value) 🔥
  • Your project showcased on Twilio CodeExchange, with a winner badge ✨
  • $300 USD credit to the DEV Shop 🎁
  • DEV “Twilio Hackathon” winner badge 🏆

With that, congratulations to the winners of the April 2020 Twilio x DEV Hackathon!

The Winners

HomeBound (COVID-19 Communications Winner)

The HomeBound project was developed by a team of 5 and aims to improve your life in self-isolation through a mix of functionality. It offers a gamified activity tracker to encourage you to stick to the activities and goals you set for yourself, and a chat bot powered by Programmable Chat and Twilio Autopilot to get answers to common questions. Finally, they added a voluntary close contact tracker. You can use it to keep track of when you saw people last, and reach out to them directly from within the app using Programmable SMS.

Congratulations Adrian Bece, Vlatko Vlahek, Josip Ravas, Igor Plac and Valentina Bermanec!

🔗 Find HomeBound on the Twilio CodeExchange | Read more about their project and journey on DEV

Stream My PC (Engaging Engagements Winner)

Now more than ever it is important for businesses to find good ways to interact with their customers and clients. We've recently seen a spike in interest in engagement via video calls – and Stream My PC offers a variety of smart ways to use video. From streaming local video files over digital whiteboards to screen capture, it provides functionality that goes beyond the classic video call. (And all powered by Twilio Video.) Additionally, it provides a text-based chat that viewers of the live stream can use to interact with the host, powered by Programmable Chat.

Congratulations Godwin Agedah!

🔗 Find Stream my PC on the Twilio CodeExchange | Read more about Stream my PC on DEV 

Trello + Twilio (Interesting Integrations Winner)

This winner combines the power of Trello and Twilio to create something that can be immensely useful for a variety of use cases.

Maybe you want to offer an SMS to your customers that they can reply to if they have questions about your business? Maybe you want to set up a masked phone number that you can use for places like Craigslist to not showcase your own number? Or – maybe you are just a huge fan of Kanban over a classic SMS interface?

This integration will automatically forward incoming SMS to your Kanban board on Trello, and let you reply to those text messages by commenting on the card.

Congratulations Emma Goto!

🔗 Find the Trello + Twilio integration on the Twilio CodeExchange | Read more about the Trello + Twilio integration on DEV

Hypothetitech (Exciting X-Factors Winner)

We wanted to have a category where people could be creative and build things we didn’t anticipate – we certainly saw a lot of submissions that fit that bill.

The winner in our eyes was Hypothetitech. This team used Twilio Studio to craft "choose your own adventure" vacations so you can go on vacation without even leaving your house. They chose Studio to allow folks to interactively create these storylines by leveraging a visual drag and drop interface.

Congratulations Amber Case and B. Greenstein!

🔗 Find Hypothetitech on the Twilio CodeExchange | Read more about Hypothetitech on DEV

Runners-Up

There were so many amazing submissions this Hackathon! While unfortunately not everyone could be a grand-prize winner, we had a number of submissions that won a runner up prize.

Each of these teams will receive:

Congratulations to all of our runners-up!

What's Next?

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If you won, we'll reach out to you this week with information about the prizes. We are also working our way through publishing the runner-up projects on Twilio CodeExchange.

For everyone who submitted a valid project, we are extremely grateful for your submission and the team from DEV will reach out to you for your participation prize. Thank you so much for taking the time to build a project and sending it in! We'll continue working through your submissions and add applicable submissions to Twilio CodeExchange (this might take some time).

If you had a great time working with Twilio, or are inspired by what you see here, we’d love to see more of your ideas on CodeExchange! Learn more how you can get involved in Twilio CodeExchange. You can also follow Twilio on DEV for regular content by Twilions and our community.

We can't wait to see what you build!