If you've ever wondered about the story behind your favorite emoji, this app is for you. We'll build an interactive bot to give us more information about just what 💁 is doing. With the Twilio API for WhatsApp and Emojipedia 👌😍 we can easily query this information on demand.

🌅 Getting started

Before we can dig into some code, make sure that your Python and Flask development environment is setup. If you haven't done so already,

1. Install Python 3
2. Install Ngrok to make your Flask app visible from the internet so Twilio can send requests to it
3. Set up your Python development environment 

If you're new to Python and Flask check out this handy guide for more information on getting started.

I've started the project off, so clone or download the repo from GitHub and checkout the getting-started branch.

💬 Setting Up Twilio API Sandbox …

There are some features of iOS apps that don’t work from the iOS simulator. Maybe you want to test how your application works with the device camera or send an SMS message from your application. For these examples and more you’ll need to test and debug your app using a real device.

This post will walk through how to run the Xcode simulator on your iPhone or other iOS device and show you how to fix some common errors you’ll see along the way.

How to select your iPhone as the “Simulator” Device

Simulator is in quotes here since this will create an actual app on your phone; it’s no longer a simulation. Open up a project in Xcode and click on the device near the Run ▶ button at the top left of your Xcode screen.

Plug your iPhone into your computer. You can select your device from the …

Security is at the top of everyone’s mind and phone verification is a simple way to secure your application and help prevent bot accounts. Phone verification is a common security tool used when people sign up for a product or give you their phone number for the first time.

Confidence in your users’ phone numbers decreases fraud and increases reliability of notifications. Let’s take a look at how to verify phone numbers from an iOS application using Swift and the Twilio Verify API.

This tutorial will walk you through the process of SMS phone verification step by step. You can check out the final project on my GitHub.

What you’ll need

To code along with this post, you’ll need:

• A Twilio account
• A Verify Service which you can create in the Twilio console
• A Heroku account
• Xcode version 9 or higher

Setting up

Navigate to the …

Apache Spark aims to solve the problem of working with large scale distributed data and with access to over 500 million leaked passwords we have a lot of data to dig through. If you spend any time with the password data set, you’ll notice how simple most passwords are. This is why we’re always thinking about how to encourage stronger passwords and recommend turning on Two-factor authentication everywhere it’s available.

While tools like Excel and Python are great for data analysis, Spark helps solve the problem of what to do once the data you’re working with gets too large to fit into the memory of your local computer.

This tutorial will show you how to get setup for running Spark and introduce the tools and code that allow you to do data manipulation and exploration. Read on to find out how to spot the most common password lengths, suffixes, and …

Earlier this year Troy Hunt released version 2 of his popular Pwned Passwords API service. The new version comes with even more compromised passwords and a more secure way to query the password API that doesn’t require sending plain text passwords over the network.

The API update comes at a good time. When NIST updated its password guidelines in 2016, it included a new recommendation to check “memorized secret verifiers”, or passwords, against known data breaches:

When processing requests to establish and change memorized secrets, verifiers SHALL compare the prospective secrets against a list that contains values known to be commonly-used, expected, or compromised. For example, the list MA …

I travel a lot for both work and pleasure. My mom loves to know where I’m jetsetting off to and I was failing to keep her properly updated. I could share my location via Find my Friends, but that doesn’t solve the problem of upcoming travel events. I could create a shared document or calendar, but she isn’t always in front of a computer.

Enter the Where’s Kelley bot.

Using Twilio SMS, I hooked up a phone number to my Google calendar and created a simple text message bot that my mom can ask about my current location and upcoming travel schedule.

This post will walk through how to build one for yourself! Check out the final code here or follow along with this tutorial to build your own Text Travel Tracker from scratch.

Google Calendar API and Service Accounts

First things first, you’ll need a calendar to track. The …

We have a big problem when it comes to password security.

People reuse passwords. And they use passwords that are short and easy to guess. This is a problem because even if you don’t care if your Myspace account gets hacked, if you were using the same password there as you are for your email or your bank account, you’re gonna have a bad time.

That’s because hackers will use those leaked credentials to gain access to your other accounts in a process known as credential stuffing. It’s still common practice because bad actors can make a lot of money doing this.

You may hope people have moved past using short, easy to crack passwords like 123456, but of course there are people that still u …

If you’ve ever wanted to create an SMS bot with Scala, you’re in the right place. Perhaps you’re looking for an interactive way to learn Scala or trying to build some automation into your customer interactions. Your SMS bot can be informational or just pure fun. We’ll be building a bot that will respond with your fictional bank balance. In this post, you will learn how to:

1. Sign up for Twilio and get your first SMS-enabled Twilio phone number
2. Set up your development environment to send and receive messages
3. Receive inbound text messages
4. Reply to incoming messages with an SMS

Installation

Let’s make sure we’re set up with the necessary dependencies.
Requirements:

• Java JDK 8
• SBT, I’m using version 0.13.6
• Ngrok
• A Twilio account (you can sign up for a free account if you don’t have one)
• A Twilio phone number that can send and receive SMS messages …

We’ve all been there – you just need to send an email from your application. Maybe it’s password resets or a product notification. You’re probably reading this because you’ve hit that point. Whatever your use case, this post will walk through how to send an email in code using a plain ol’ Gmail account. I’ll also show you how to fix some common errors you’ll see along the way.

What you’ll need

To code along with this post, you’ll need:

• Python (I’m using Python 3.6.4)
• Pip for installing dependencies
• Virtualenv
• A Gmail account

In a new folder create a requirements.txt file. This file will help you manage your dependencies in a Python project. We only have one dependency for this project; add the following to your requirements.txt file:

You can read more about Flask-Mail in their documentation. Now we can set up our virtualenv, a Python …