I love Harry Potter, and part of the reason I love the wizarding world so much is that those people know how to use shortcuts! I often look at the habitual tasks of my daily life and wish I had a magical umbrella that could clean up my messes and fold my clothes. But while I still longingly hope for real-world shortcuts, I at least have a good start with my developer shortcuts, and I’d like to share a few with y’all now.

The Gist

Today I will talk about a few local scripts and shortcuts that I rely on daily when working with Twilio. These fall into a few categories:

• Working with git
• Boilerplate stuff
• Twilio functions I use a lot
• Managing my local environment
• Commonly used commands

Let’s get out our time turners and start in the middle :)

Managing my local environment & commonly used commands …

The other day I was walking down Market St. in San Francisco when I saw an ad for a conference that portrayed a developer as a hoodie-clad man, face half obscured, waiting to hack your website. I didn’t even alter my stride as I took it in. Let’s be honest, this sort of image is par for the course. Just google “hacker” and see what comes up.

For generations, movies, video games, and tv shows have portrayed the developer as either an awkward hoodie-wearing nerd, or an insane and menacing basement dweller (or both). From Ace Ventura to Silicon Valley, everyone has had their chance to portray the developer. Few actors do this with the same grace they’d reserve for a role portraying a doctor.

But here’s the thing — I’m a developer.  

When I tell my aunt what I do for a living, I get the slow “ …

Valentine’s day isn’t my favorite holiday, mostly because I never seem to get my act together before the big day. But even though the holiday leaves me confused and clueless, the thought of adding a little more love into the world never does. So this year, instead of planning a wonderful night (like maybe I should have done?), I instead opened my laptop and decided to resurrect a 400 year-old poet who had a lot to say on the subject of love— Billy H. Shakespeare.

The thinking was simple, since I’m notoriously bad at writing romantic cards, maybe Shakespeare could do some of the heavy lifting for me. In short I wanted to create an artificially intelligent Shakespeare bot that would:

• Tell me if my romantic prose was good or awful
• Create a custom sonnet for me on demand

Worst-case scenario was that it would give me a good excuse …

Today, Santa Claus and his team at the North Pole unveiled a new communications service that will make it easier for children of all ages to send Christmas wishes and increase the accuracy of Santa’s global gift distribution program.

The new SantaPhone service enables parents to schedule phone calls between one of Santa’s elves and their children. The conversation is recorded and instantly shared with Santa and the parents so all are aware of a child’s Christmas wishes.

“Like many organizations that are undergoing digital transformation, we’ve evolved to make it easier for children and parents to communicate their Christmas wish list,” said Mr. Claus, head merry-maker and chief operations officer of the North Pole. “It’s no longer convenient for parents and children to hand write letters and mail them in. We found that a lot of letters went missing in the post, which led to some sad faces on …

Is it just me, or has 2016 been an extra rough year? It seemed like everyday on Facebook or Twitter there would be another piece of horrible news. Off the top of my head this year brought:

• The Syrian Refugee crisis
• Orlando shooting
• RIP Prince
• RIP Alan Rickman
• RIP Gene Wilder
• Harambe
• RIP Parse

And personally I lost my Grandpa this year, who aside from reinventing himself in the last years of his life, was one of the best PHP developers I’ve ever met. Needless to say this year was full of bad news. It was this feeling and some help from my son, Reddit, and Crocodile Dundee that lead to me building the Good News bot.  It all started with a robot costume….

Elliott the Robot

My son Elliott is a two year-old and luckily he doesn’t read the news. He does however, have strong opinions about …

Hi there builders, developers and doers of all kinds.

If you haven’t heard, we are throwing an epic party called $bash to close out the SIGNAL conference. If you were at SIGNAL last year, then you probably remember the giant carnival we had on night one. Well this year we’re doing it again, but going even bigger and bringing you to space (almost literally). It’s gonna be rad. Play games, solve puzzles, compete in code challenges and win prizes all while you eat, drink & be merry with friends. It’s basically Space Camp for grown-ups :).

As part of the festivities on May 25th, we’re going to have fun code challenges that will earn you credits and prizes. First-time coder? Have no fear! You can win something while learning new coding skills in our ‘Hello $bash!’ challenge. But here’s the hitch, we want to be inspired by …

We on the SIGNAL Conference planning committee wanted to drop a quick update about $bash, our closing party for SIGNAL 2016.

TLDR; though we had originally planned on hosting $bash in space, we regretfully must admit that the rumors are incorrect, it will not actually be held in space.

Last year Twilio management removed their thinking caps and encouraged internal rabble-rousers to plan a crazy event for day one of SIGNAL. Our own Rob Spectre donned his Sunday best and hosted the off-the-wall, crazy, nerd carnival also known as $bash 2015. Look, I won’t lie, according to local engineers we partied so hard that the roof was actually raised several centimeters. Just listen to what people had to say who were present last year:

it's not a party, it's a $bash @twilio #signalconf (at @FortMasonInsf in San Francisco, CA) https://t.co/qWZ32XgYk7 pic.twitter.com/msr087TCSM

— Ashley Waxman (@AshleyWaxman) May 20, 2015

Who …

Follow along with the tutorial here: ETA Notifications in Rails

Hi Jarod from Twilio here. Today we’re going to walk through one of the sample apps available within Twilio Tutorials.

Production-Ready Sample Apps

When we started building these tutorials, we heard from developers that technical documentation focused too much on isolated “code snippets” and not enough on end-to-end solutions suitable for production environments. This feedback was eye-opening and lead to us implement fully production-ready sample apps, and in this instance, creating the fake company Laundr.io, to illustrate the use-case.

Today I’m going to walk you through Laundr.io and explain how to build SMS ETA Notifications in Ruby and Rails. SMS ETA notifications are an easy way to update your customers on the status of their order or delivery. For example, Uber uses ETA notifications to send you a text when your driver is arriving.
In this short video I’ll …

We’re dead excited to share the latest documentation experience from Twilio: our new Tutorials. Providing annotated walkthroughs of example Twilio applications, Tutorials are intended to provide a clear path for your journey to production.

For these guided tours, we tried to reimagine what a technical documentation experience could be. Code-forward and IDE-like, Tutorials aim to present a sample Twilio application in a familiar setting with the context of your favorite web framework.

It’s the friendly walkthrough you’d get from a fellow developer on your first day in a code base, in tasty online form.

What’s Wrong With Code Tutorials?

We feel a lot of online technical documentation still suffers from the vestiges of offline technical manuals. First we get a huge blob of text to parse through, then maybe a hastily scrawled diagram to show the flow of the application and finally below …