I try not to have favorites in the Twilio community, but for the Brooklyn hackers using the platform I confess there’s a special place in my heart for Adam Varga and Elliot Gardiner over at Datalot. They built one of the most sophisticated, data-driven contact centers I’ve seen in my time at Twilio and we were way stoked they came to SIGNAL last year to share some of the stuff they learned in the process.

That 30 minutes is one of the most information rich pieces of technical content we have on Twilio. Their breakdown of the consumer experience they’ve created overflows with pragmatic Twilio tips like:

• Tricks on managing call state with <Queue> humanely
• Warm transfers with <Confe …

In just 16 weeks, SIGNAL is coming back to San Francisco May 24th and 25th. We got a brand new venue at Pier 27, killer new lineup of over 100 speakers, and barrels brimming with new shenanigans we have in store for our favorite shindig of the season. Last year, I shared a few reasons why I thought you should join us at SIGNAL with your whole team of developers.

A whole lot of you did – and what a time we had together. This year I wanted to extend the same invitation, but for a few new reasons. I’m more stoked to see you at SIGNAL and here’s why.

High Signal-to-Noise for Diverse Teams of Software People

We always aim to provide zero-fluff, no-pitch technical deep dives when we ask for your time, and this Twilio tradition continues with the shindig this year. This go-round we steered the lineup …

Today we’re releasing Twilio’s first transparency report detailing requests for customer information by municipal, state, provincial and federal governments globally. As part of our commitment to the privacy of your data, this report represents the start of a program to produce clear visibility to the Twilio community around these requests.

In this spirit, this report’s objective is to inform you of the total volume of government requests for information received by Twilio, how Twilio responded to the requests and how often Twilio notified users of the requests.

• You can view a PDF of the entire report here
• You can download a text file of the report from our GitHub repository where we will store all future reports here.
• Read our statement on privacy here.

What This Report Means

Twilio powers communications ranging from voice to messaging to video. As a communications platform relied on by tens of …

Just over a year ago, Marinos Bernitsas was cutting C++ code for algorithmic trading systems at a high frequency trading fund in New York City. Having spent a career in finance and amassing a wealth of creative ideas he wanted to hack on, Marinos struck out on his own to become an independent app developer. Publishing two apps in the iTunes Store upon a life of programming experience, he stopped by TechCrunch Disrupt NYC this weekend to put his creative skills to the test: his first time in the 24 hour crucible of an all-night hackathon. Incredibly, Marinos took first place.

“It’s my first hackathon – I’m still in shock,” Marinos exhaled backstage at the perennial hackathon event in New York’s Manhattan Center. “I’ve been meaning to do a hackathon for so long – I finally did it with Disrupt.”

Picking off the $5,000 grand prize is no small …

Your backlog is a mile high, your roadmap a mile long and your available story points always feel like they are half as many as you need. Everyone above you thinks the product should have shipped yesterday. Everyone below you is begging for another two sprints to complete their work, warning of grave technical debt. The dance of a technical leader is on the razorblade shoved between short term speed and long term ambition – parting with even a single hacker for a single day represents steep opportunity cost.

Many shops can only part with their developers for one conference a year. For your developers, I want that conference to be Signal in San Francisco next month, May 19th and 20th.

Here’s why.

Zero Noise and No Fluff – Only Real Technical Talks

As developers, Signal was the opportunity to craft the conference we would want to attend ourselves – …

A couple of weeks ago we announced the public beta of Elastic SIP Trunking, a new way to connect your SIP gear to the world through Twilio. With Elastic SIP Trunks, you can say sayonara to artificial constraints to scaling and pricing shenanigans. We think this new way of consuming SIP connectivity offers longtime VoIP network administrators and engineers an instantly provisioned, powerfully resilient alternative to the SIP trunk.

One of the more frequent requests we received after opening the Elastic SIP Trunking beta was how to connect an Elastic SIP Trunk from Twilio to FreeSWITCH, the popular open source SIP platform.  Let’s find out how to do that together.

A Twilio SIP Trunk provides a domain to connect your SIP switching equipment to Twilio. During our public beta, Elastic SIP Trunks only provides termination service, which is to say you can only place outbound …

Since our launch a few weeks ago of Twilio MMS, your friendly neighborhood devangel crew has been busy having a barrel of monkeys building sick hacks on this new medium.  From a tasty mustacher to an on demand GIF generator to a Instagram-for-every-phone, thousands of people have created hilarious photos using Twilio MMS.

Sharing these on a big screen for a room full of folks to see was one of the first requests we received. With Ricky, Kevin and Carter kicking out tons of tasty node.js tutorials, I thought I’d dust off my own JavaScript chops and try my hand at solving this with Express. Today we’re going to build a photostream we can project on a wall that updates in real time based on M …

Holy biscuits was last week a barrel of monkeys.  All of us at Twilio have had a beastly boatload of fun seeing the stuff you’ve started building with Twilio MMS.  Many of you blazed through Kevin’s Getting Started with MMS tutorial over the weekend to get started on your hacks and, of course, seeing all your mustached faces with the example project we built last week remains a source of never-ending laughs.

This go round, I thought we would have a look at something a little more real world.  Working on the devangel crew, I get to travel around the world meeting all kinds of developers producing rad work.  While on the road, keeping an eye on the apartment back in Brooklyn definitely provides some peace of mind.  For my second hack, I thought I might provide that in real time using MMS.  These kinds of cameras are available …

All of us at Twilio are over the moon by the possibilities now unlocked by the availability of MMS on US phone numbers.  We know from experience that the real ingenuity will come from you – the air around Twilio is electric with anticipation of the amazing things you’ll build.  We’ve got a lot of hacks we’re excited to show you in the weeks that follow along with the best work we find from all of you.

Have a sick MMS hack?  Send it my way – rob@twilio.com.  Want to get started? Check out this guide by Kevin Whinnery. We can’t wait to see what you build.

To kick off our autumn of MMS hacking, I wanted to share the first thing I did with Twilio MMS.  A couple years ago, my buddy Aidan Feldman released one of the most critical photo services the Internet has yet …