The npm ecosystem is vast by now with almost 750k packages published. Naturally, you’ll find yourself often trying to look up a package you don’t remember. The npm search is great for that but what if you just want to quickly look up a package on the go? Let’s build a bot that can look up the packages for us using Twilio’s API for WhatsApp integration.

Requirements

Just like with Twilio Programmable SMS we’ll need a webhook that will respond to incoming HTTP requests with every message sent to our WhatsApp bot. The webhook then has to reply with TwiML to reply to these messages.

We’ll build our webhook using Twilio Functions. This allows us to write Node.js code and host it in a serverless function directly on Twilio.

To get started make sure you have:

• A Twilio account (sign up for a ...

I 💖 emojis, so when I heard about the new Twilio API for WhatsApp I wanted to build something emojiriffic. Inspired by Monica Dinculescu’s to_emoji Twitter bot and emoji translator I decided to build a WhatsApp text-to-emoji translator. You can try it out now by sending your message to our WhatsApp number +441745472072.

Here’s how you too can build this app.

🛠 Tools

I decided to build this project using Node.js, following in the footsteps of Monica’s projects. WhatsApp messages via Twilio result in webhooks, much the same as receiving an SMS message to a Twilio number, so if you’ve built a Twilio SMS application before this will be familiar. For ease of deploying this, I’m going to build this as a Twilio Function.

If you want to follow along with building the emoji translator you’ll need:

• A Twilio account (sign up for a free ...

Twilio Sync for IoT provides two sets of API to build end-to-end experiences with your embedded and wearable devices using the same Sync primitives used for mobile devices and web browsers. Sync for IoT lets you expand your real time applications to the Internet of Things. 

Let’s set up the demo system shown in the main photo, which includes a browser interface and an ESP32 board with a humidity and temperature sensor attached. We’ll use JavaScript, Node.js, the Twilio Sync Rest API and the Twilio Sync JavaScript Client Library to interact with the Sync resource on our IoT device and our web server and browser clients at the same time.

If you just want to see the finished code, see this Github repository. It has been verified to work with Chrome, Firefox and IE and with an ESP-wrover-kit.

Prerequisites for Our Sync for IoT Build

To follow ...

Two years ago, Alexander Kallaway created an online movement called #100DaysOfCode. The purpose was to get out of “tutorial purgatory” and start building real projects to advance himself as a programmer.

The challenge is simple: commit to coding for 100 days and tweet about your progress using the hashtag #100DaysOfCode. Sounds fun, right?

It totally is, until you lose track of what day you’re on. That’s where this comes in. We’re going to build a simple Node app using Twilio, Firebase and Twitter to help you easily track your progress.

Prep Local Environment

The very first thing we’re going to want to do is install Node v8.11.3 and npm v5.6  – link to installation. The reason we’re using Node is because we’re going to be working with multiple APIs and working on the server-side. Node provides a great JavaScript-powered backend.

Before we ...

Access to customer context is key to a great customer experience in voice and messaging flows. As it lets you customize your interactions specific to that customer and address their needs promptly.

In this blog post, we will walk through the steps involved in connecting to Salesforce CRM database with Twilio Studio. This means, that when a customer calls into your contact center, in realtime, we can ask the CRM for more details about the caller based on their phone number.  With this additional context, we can present an IVR tailored to their needs or use that information to intelligently route their call.

Before we get started, if you haven’t yet used Studio, I recommend taking a look at this getting started with Studio guide.

Flows in Studio are built with widgets which is a state or transition in our flow. In this post we will mainly use the ...

Progressive web applications (PWAs) can be built to make inconsistent internet connections much easier for users to handle. For example, offline-first web apps like this one that store shopping items locally. That example PWA was built with Hoodie and added a service worker script that enabled the app to load when it was offline. We can add more functionality to that PWA to make it even better for users.

In this post, we’re going to clone our progressive web app and make it installable. Being installable means it’ll be added to the device’s home screen and launched like a native app. To make it installable, we’re going to add a web app manifest and add Workbox to the build step to automatically generate a service worker.

Getting ready to code

To code along with me, you’ll need the following:

1. NodeJS version 6.6.0 (or ...

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 MAY include, but is not limited to passwords obtained from previous breach corpuses.

Since the API release, the community has created API wrappers in many of our favorite programming languages. In this post, I round up the libraries in 7 languages ...

Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, Bitcoin Cash, Dogecoin, Litecoin—the list of cryptocurrency coins is endless, and new technologies are emerging daily. In this tutorial, we are going to create an app that sends SMS text messages whenever a cryptocurrency’s market value crosses a price threshold. Cryptocurrency investors can sit back, let the market do its thing, and wait for opportunities instead of compulsively checking the markets!

Following Along

For the purpose of this tutorial, I have set up a repository with the complete code hosted Github: https://github.com/ssenkus/coin-sms-alert. You will be able to build everything you need by following the steps in this post, but if you want to see what the completed project looks like at any step, you can clone this repository with the following command on your command line interface/terminal:

For each step ...

Twilio Studio makes it easy to manage voice call flows with its visual user interface. A Studio flow typically starts with a trigger event such as an incoming call to your Twilio phone number. The tutorial Forward Call with Studio has an Incoming Call as the trigger followed by a Connect Call To (forward_call) widget that forwards the call to a person’s phone number (see following screen print). The above flow, adds logic in between the trigger and the forward_call widget. This article is how to add logic using a Studio Run Function widget to call a Twilio Function, followed by a Split widget.

Building logic into the flow gives Studio more power to route calls to various destinations. The example here, is to choose between routing a call to the main office phone during business hours, or to voicemail after business hours.

In the my example flow, Business_hours ...

Have you ever needed to programmatically download an image from an MMS message sent to your Twilio number? Well here’s all the code you need to do this using Node.js and Express:

To run the above code, you’ll need ...