On July 20, 1969, at 20:18 UTC, Neil Armstrong was the first human to set foot on the Moon. Video of Neil descending the ladder of the lunar module was broadcast to earth at 10 frames a second via an image transmission method known as Slow-scan Television, or “SSTV”.

Today I’ll be showing you how to use the space-age technology of SSTV and your telephone to do something critical to human progress: look at pictures of cats.

We’ll be using an SSTV transmission mode called “Martin M2”. Martin M2 is an SSTV transmission mode which is popular with European Ham radio operators and differs significantly from the system that NASA used to transmit images back from the moon.

Keep in mind that this post is just for fun and a little complicated. If you want an easy way to send pictures to mobile phones, you should look at …

Since writing this post, we’ve created a new tutorial showing you how to quickly add two-factor authentication to your applications updated with some more recent techniques not highlighted below.

Check out the newest TFA Tutorial here

Why Two-Factor Authentication?

Back in the day, it used to be that enforcing a strong password policy was sufficient to prevent unauthorized access into your user’s accounts. (Ah, those were the days, when kids were polite and respected their elders). However, as the security landscape continues to evolve, it is becoming clear that a strong password policy is not enough any more. Today, an attacker can discover your user’s password in a variety of ways: they might find your user’s password on a stolen or lost computer, they might find their password on another site where your user used the same password, or your user’s computer might be infected with a virus that …

If you are a web developer, you know that handling file uploads is not fun. You are either spending time dealing with files and permissions, or learning how your language handles MIME multipart encoding. Then there is the problem of dealing with large file uploads and cross-browser compatibility.

Even when you get the basics figured out, all that you have working is something that allows your users to upload files from their computer. If you want to enable your users to choose photos and files from a service like Facebook, Dropbox, Google Drive or Flickr, well, that’s a whole other story. Integrating these different APIs, normalizing response formats, and maintaining these integrations can be time consuming.

Does this sound familiar? If it does, you will be excited to learn that Filepicker.io has made this process a whole lot easier. Filepicker.io provides APIs to connect, process, and …

TwilioSheet is a little utility that makes it easy for developers to receive SMS messages in a Google Spreadsheet.

I write a lot of simple little SMS applications, but they can be daunting at times. I often wonder if the idea is worth the time it takes to write the code to store, process, and act on the incoming messages. Why not use something a little easier? A spreadsheet perhaps? Well, that’s what TwilioSheet lets you do.

Once you’ve set up TwilioSheet, SMS messages sent to your Twilio number will show up in your spreadsheet after a few seconds. You can easily process the SMS messages that are coming into your spreadsheet using built-in spreadsheet functions or you can write your own functions in JavaScript.

Want to get started right now? Head over to the GitHub repository for TwilioSheet. Otherwise, read on.

While I wouldn’t recommend using a …

Chad Arimura is a co-founder and CEO of Iron.io, makers of IronWorker, scalable background worker service, and IronMQ, hosted reliable message queue service. A web applications developer for over 15 years, Chad is a big believer in “serverless” app development.

IronWorker is a great way to add scheduling capabilities to your mobile and web apps. Below is a tutorial for a simple web app Chad built that keeps you on a schedule when the order of events is important using Twilio. 

Twilio brings voice and messaging to your web and mobile applications. Their developer-friendly API makes it dead simple to integrate voice and SMS communications into your apps. If you haven’t tried Twilio yet, you definitely should.

It took multiple hackathons watching teams build some awesome hacks to realize that IronWorker + Twilio is a match made in app heaven.

IronWorker provides a powerful cloud scheduler …

My name is Joël, I recently joined the Developer Evangelism team at Twilio. The main reason I joined Twilio was because it gave me the chance to help developers, which is one of the things I love to do.

What I didn’t expect when I joined was that I would have so many opportunities to make a meaningful impact so soon after starting.

One of these opportunities was a project where I helped the Utah Foster Care Foundation. For the past 10 years, the Utah Foster Care Foundation has held a Chalk Art Festival to “shine a spotlight on the needs of Utah children in foster care […] and raise funds that benefit these deserving children and families. “

Recently, this festival has included a People’s Choice Award that allowed festival visitors to vote for their favorite entry via SMS. Naturally, this …

On Thursday, July 19th, we will be holding Office Hours at Twilio HQ in San Francisco from 5pm until 7pm. You can RSVP here.

Bring your laptop, code, and questions. Office hours are a great time to work with 1:1 with Twilio and other developers in the community. We’d love to answer your questions, offer suggestions, and help you solve problems.

If you have a question about Twilio, or just want to spend some time working on that side project, now is the time. Look forward to seeing you!

Twilio HQ is located at 501 Folsom Street, 1st floor. You’ll find the door facing 1st Street, just ring the bell when you arrive.

We will be holding Office Hours at the Twilio HQ in San Francisco on Thursday, May 31st from 5pm until 7pm. RSVP here. 

Office Hours are a great time for you to stop by and work with your friendly local Twilio employee. We’d love to answer questions, offer suggestions, and help you solve problems.

Bring your laptop, code, and questions! It’s not strictly required that you do so, just highly recommended.

So please stop by if you have a question about Twilio, need help figuring something out, or just want to spend a few hours to working on a side-project. We’re looking forward to seeing you!

Twilio HQ is located at 501 Folsom Street, 1st floor. You’ll find the door facing 1st Street, just ring the bell when you arrive.