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What’s up Operators,

Thanks a ton to those of you who have participated in the TQ3 preview! Your early feedback has been incredibly valuable as we gear up for the first of many releases this summer. I wanted to drop a quick note to everyone to share some exciting updates from the team and another track from our work-in-progress soundtrack.

This is the first edition of a weekly newsletter on the development process for TwilioQuest, an upcoming PC game for Mac, Windows, and Linux. Sign up for early access to the game here, and the Operator’s Manual will be conveniently delivered to your inbox every week! You should also join us for the world premiere of TwilioQuest 3 during Superclass at SIGNAL, Twilio’s annual developer conference.

What’s up Operators!

Welcome to the first edition of the Operator’s Manual, a weekly newsletter intended to keep you all in the loop on the development process for TwilioQuest. Currently in a private preview, the next version of TwilioQuest will debut later this summer. You can sign up for early access right here.

My name is Kevin Whinnery, and I'm the creator and lead developer of TwilioQuest. Very pleased to meet you! What I hope to do in the …

When we released the first version of TwilioQuest in 2013, developers had a great time leveling up their Twilio API skills and equipping rad loot on their (extremely primitive!) TwilioQuest avatar. A few years ago, we made it possible to participate in TwilioQuest even if you couldn’t join us for a live training event (BTW, you totally should). Today, we’d like to invite you to sign up to try a new version of TwilioQuest, which is unlike anything we’ve attempted before.

The next incarnation TwilioQuest is a top-down role-playing game inspired by the classics of the 16-bit era, playable on desktop PCs. In TwilioQuest, you will assume the role of an Operator in the top-secret TwilioQuest program. This elite unit of programmers and explorers has assembled to take on a shadowy organization known as the Legacy Systems, whose goal is complete control of the virtual universe we …

It’s hard to believe that five years have gone by since the very first TwilioQuest hackers joined us for TwilioCon 3 in San Francisco. In those days, you had to join us in person to play TwilioQuest. Today, you can play TwilioQuest whenever you want - and we can think of no better way to celebrate five years of TwilioQuest than doing just that. It wouldn’t be much of a quest, though, if there wasn’t some rad loot to be won.

To that end, we’re bringing back our Hack for Hamilton competition, where you can win tickets for you and a guest to be in the room where it happens in New York, Chicago, or Charlotte. To be eligible to win, you must playing TwilioQuest between now and 3pm Pacific time on Monday, October 29th.

I am not throwing away my shot! How do I get started?

Here are …

Did you know that Twilio.org offers credits and discounts for nonprofits and social enterprises? Learn more today.

The crew at Twilio.org have noticed that nonprofits and social enterprises are growing ever more serious about data collection, measurement, and engagement with beneficiaries and donors. One of the most common tools we see organizations employing in those pursuits is Salesforce. With support from Salesforce.org, it’s no surprise that over 32,000 nonprofit organizations are using Salesforce to power mission-critical workflows.

We decided it’s high time that Twilio provided first-class support for the administrators and developers building on the Salesforce platform. Today, we’d like to invite you to sign up for access to a preview release of Twilio for Salesforce, a managed package for Twilio DOers in the Salesforce community.

Go here to sign up for early access to the preview, and read on to learn more about it!

No Code …

Do you work for a nonprofit or social enterprise? Sign up with Twilio.org for free API credits and discount pricing to increase your impact through effective communication.

SMS messages are opened 98% of the time within minutes of being received. When you need to reach your constituents quickly and consistently, there’s no better medium than SMS.

Imagine having a magic phone number your organization’s members, volunteers, or donors could text in to, signing up for timely SMS updates from organizers. Imagine being an organizer with the ability to reach all your subscribers, at once, from anywhere via SMS. Could that help your organization move faster or engage with your community more effectively?

If you’ve got five minutes, you can set up such a phone number and find out. Follow along with the video tutorial below to learn how to deploy one of these phone numbers, without needing to write any …

Do you or a developer you know code for a nonprofit or social enterprise? Twilio.org can help with API credit and discount pricing to increase your impact.

When you use Twilio at scale, like our Twilio.org buddies DoSomething and Mobile Commons, webhooks can generate a significant amount of traffic to your web application. Each inbound message and status callback generate an HTTP request to your app. These requests add up quickly if you’re sending thousands or millions of messages, and can lead to traffic your application can’t easily support.

Many advanced Twilio users quickly offload incoming webhook requests to a queue like SQS, so that they can process these incoming requests more efficiently with background workers. With the new Functions feature, you can offload this queueing task to Twilio and only worry about the workers that clear out the queue. This can also be handy if you don’t …

As developers, we know there are two truths in making great software on this Internet:

1. The answer is out there somewhere.
2. We need it now.

Today, we’re launching a new documentation format called Guides aimed squarely at those two truths. Guides are digestible instruction for Twilio APIs on how to do common things with the haste demanded by the modern programmer. Along with this new content, you might also notice a few design upgrades in service of putting code first in your documentation.

New Docs In Tasty Task Sized Morsels

Want to track a conversation between two phone numbers in Ruby? Or gather DTMF tones in PHP? Or confirm the delivery of a message in C#?

Guides gives you the info to complete a single task with content crafted for speedy consumption.

Fast Lane to the Goods: Introducing CodeRail

Along with new content, we’ve also rolled …

As a developer, you quickly learn that your ability to excel (or maybe function at all) is strongly correlated with your Google-fu.

Personally, when working across multiple programming languages and platforms, the exact incantation I need to display a UIAlertController or store an HTTP response in a cache is not found in the 32 kilobytes of RAM between my ears. So I turn to Google to fill in the gaps. And Google, in turn, turns to Stack Overflow. Chances are good that the right Stack Overflow answer will reward me with a chunk of code or a pointer I require to continue with my task.

That’s why I was so excited to learn about Stack Overflow Documentation. The focus of this new member of the Stack Overflow family is providing code examples and written guides that demonstrate how to get things done with the tools and programming languages …