After I gave a talk at Shakacon this year, I was pleased that people came up to me with additional questions—pleased, that is, until someone asked me for a business card and I realized I didn’t have any with me. Whoops.

In this quick post, I’ll describe how I solved that problem by creating an app that sends business cards over SMS and I’ll show how you can do it too.

Why Build an SMS Business Card

I wanted to create something quickly that would let me share information selectively; not everyone should have my cell phone number. It had to be flexible and extensible. It had to solve the problem with the resources I had on-hand. That meant my laptop, a power adapter, and a Twilio account were my raw materials.

This app really showcases the power of Twilio and what’s possible with our ...

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is important for many Angular single-page applications (SPAs). You can build SEO-friendly Angular websites with Angular Universal, but how do you make your app SEO-friendly in every language your website supports? Google, Yandex, and Baidu, might request your pages in English, Spanish, Russian, or Chinese: how do you make your server-side rendering return the correct language?

The answer is ngx-translate, the internationalization (i18n) and localization library for Angular. This module makes it easy to use translation files that provide the correct language for both client-side and server-side rendering. This post will show you how to use it.

In this post we will:

• Create an Angular application with one component, the home page
• Add server-side rendering for SEO purposes with Angular Universal
• Set up internationalization in four languages with ngx-translate

To accomplish the tasks in this post you will need to install the following:

• Node.js and ...

You know that awkward feeling when you get a nice text from a friend but for some reason, you don't have their number saved? You can't remember and it’s too late for you to respond with, "I'm sorry. Who is this?"

We're going to save you from the embarrassing moment of not knowing who it is by building an app that will let you identify numbers on the go over text.

How We’re Going to Avoid This Problem

Our app will take advantage of three Twilio APIs:

- Functions: the serverless environment which will hold our app

- Lookup: to look up the phone number and see who it belongs to

- SMS: to send us a text with the phone number.

The combination of these three will allow us to send a text with a phone number to our Function which will then perform a Lookup and respond to ...

A memory leak is one of the worst types of issues you can have. It’s hard to find, hard to debug, and often hard to solve. Unfortunately, this problem occurs in every programming language or framework, including Angular. Observables are awesome, because of the incessant stream of data, but this benefaction can cause serious problem with memory leak. Today we will take a closer look at the ngOnDestroy Angular hook, and answer the question: “When should I unsubscribe from an observable? What is the best pattern to use?”

In this post we will:

• Create an app which generates random numbers.
• Reproduce a memory leak in it.
• Fix the memory leak with the takeUntil + ngOnDestroy pattern.

To accomplish these tasks, make sure you:

• Install Node.js and npm (at the time of writing I am using Node.js v8.11.1 and npm 5.8.0).
• Install @angular/cli (in ...

We talk a lot about sending SMS messages from web applications, but what about sending SMS messages from a React application? There's a bit more to it than just the server-side version, but it won't take us long.

Why shouldn't I use the REST API from the client-side?

Technically you could send an SMS using the Twilio REST API directly from a JavaScript client-side application. But (and it's a very big "but") if you were to do that, you would expose your Twilio credentials to anyone using your site. A malicious user could then take those credentials and abuse them, running up a huge bill with your account.

Live view of a hacker with your account credentials

To avoid this we will create a back end application that implements the Twilio REST API, wraps up your credentials and sends SMS messages for you. Then you can call your back end ...

Create React App is a great tool for getting a React application up and running. It's a little less clear when you're building or prototyping an application that requires a server side component, like generating access tokens for Twilio Video or Chat, though. I've found it easiest to work with a server within the same project so that you can start everything up with one command.

By the end of this post you will learn how to set up an Express server that runs alongside a React app. If you can't wait then you can jump straight into the starter project on GitHub.

How it works

There is an option that you can set in Create React App's package.json that proxies non text/html requests through to an alternative back end. You can use this feature to proxy to applications running elsewhere, but today we want to be ...

Call tracking involves saving a phone number and recording related the information about the calls made by that number. The metrics can then be used to measure the impact of marketing efforts on lead generation and sales.

Say that you are an entrepreneur or the marketing head of an organization and your main source of leads are phone calls. To spend your marketing dollars wisely, you will have to know which of your campaigns generate the maximum number of calls. This can be done using a call tracking system.

Call tracking systems used to be very expensive and cumbersome. However, in this blog post we will create an easy call tracking system that combines the powers of Twilio and Google Analytics to give you a very detailed picture of the calls and locations of these calls.

Configuring Google Analytics

Start by logging into your Google Analytics account or signing up ...

The Web Audio API is a powerful browser API for creating, manipulating and analysing audio. I'm no musician, so I'll leave the creating and manipulating to the experts. Instead, in this post we're going look at analysing audio. To make things extra interesting, we're going to see how to visualise the audio in a React component with <canvas>.

When we're done we'll have a React application that can listen to the microphone on your computer and show a waveform to visualise the data.

Getting started

We'll need Node.js to run the application, so make sure you have it installed. I've started the application for us, so follow these instructions to get it running:

1. Clone or download the repo from GitHub

1. Change into the directory and install the dependencies with npm

1. Start the application

With Twilio’s services you can manage your own group SMS application for Scheduling business meetings, planning wedding activities, parties, or a dinner get together. A friend of mine uses group SMS for family communications among his siblings and parents.

Don’t like Facebook? Or someone you want to include in your group doesn’t use Facebook or WhatsApp? No worries, use SMS. Yes, everyone with a mobile phone has an SMS app because your phone comes with an SMS app. You’re Group SMS app ready for group messaging.

The blog, How To: Set Up SMS Broadcasts in Five Minutes, says, “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.”

This blog gives you the configuration steps to communicate quickly and effectively with your friends, colleagues or customers ...

Vue.js is a powerful and approachable JavaScript framework that focuses on building user interfaces. One of the reasons why I like Vue is because it is easily adoptable. In this article, I will show you how to build a video chat application using Vue.js and Twilio Programmable Video. In the app, the participants will provide a username to get access to the chat app, then join a room (on the left of the screenshot below) to start chatting.

Here is a preview of what we'll be building:

Prerequisites

Basic knowledge of the following will be useful, but extensive knowledge is not required:

• Vue.js
• JavaScript
• Node.js (version 8 or above)

Before you continue, make sure you have Node.js installed on your system.

Getting Your Twilio API Keys

The first step to using Twilio Programmable Video chat is to get an access token. Twilio will generate a ...