What would you do if you could have a dedicated phone number for anything you wanted? This blog post will show you how to create a phone number that hides your private phone number and acts as an intermediary between your phone number and other phone numbers. The use cases are many:

• separate work and private numbers
• international numbers while traveling (without buying a local sim)
• an event hotline for Code of Conduct violations
• an alias number for a Tinder date, which you can delete if things go badly...

Let’s assume we need a number for an event Code of Conduct hotline because we would prefer not to give attendees our private number. In this post, we will build just such a phone number proxy using:

• a Twilio account – sign up for free
• a Twilio phone number with calling and texting capability
• Python 3.x
• the micro web framework Flask …

Landlines – an antiquated telephone that is often unused but kept around for legacy reasons.

I cannot remember the last time I used a landline telephone. It was probably more than three years ago. Growing up with a mobile connection has made landlines a thing of the past for younger generations.

Throughout university the only thing a student uses is a cell phone. However, once a student moves into their first place where they need to set up internet, this long-forgotten option suddenly reappears. As it did for me when I recently moved to an apartment in London. When setting up our internet we didn’t consider getting a landline. Really, why would we?

Then, after living at our new place for a few days, it hit us. We couldn’t figure out how the doorbell worked. There was no built-in intercom, so there was nothing that would make a sound when …