Receiving a POST request is the “Hello, World” v2 of building a web app. Here’s how to receive a POST request with three popular Node.js frameworks – Express, Hapi, and Koa. Let’s build an app that receives an inbound SMS webhook from Twilio. When a user texts your Twilio phone number, Twilio will make a POST request to the URL that you configure with all the bits… Read More
Node.js version 6.0.0 shipped yesterday and brings with it a ton of stellar ECMAScript 2015 features. Here are three that will make your life easier and are worth getting excited about. Function Defaults How many times have you written boilerplate code that looks something like this:
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function beginTeleportation (who, options) { options = options || {} } |
Well the days of checking for the existence of function arguments are over. Default function parameters let you define a default value… Read More
You’re building a Node app and you need to send text messages. Did you know it only takes you 30 seconds? Here’s a video to show you how quick it is to get started: Video: How To Send SMS In Node 30 Seconds You can’t copy and paste from a video, so here’s all of the code you would need with those three lines expanded in the… Read More
First they showed you how to build SMS weather alerts in Node, now the boys from Stamplay are back showing you how to build a daily SMS news service, of course, in Node. Stamplay helps automate development steps that you’d have to otherwise have to code. Let’s dive into the tutorial, the code, and all that code you’re saved from writing. Read the original post right… Read More
There’s nothing like a bum printer to inspire artistic creation. Kenneth Knowlton’s brain is flexible in a way that printers were not. He pioneered ASCII art at Bell Labs in 1966, using ASCII characters to print large scale graphics that were otherwise outside the printer’s reach in terms of graphic detail. In the near 50 years later after Knowlton printed his first iconic ASCII artwork, there… Read More
I scribble my daily to-do list in a legal pad. My legal pad doesn’t ask for my email, award me fictional points for writing in it, or display full screen prompts enticing me unlock “premium” legal pad features. It just does its job, and I like that. If you’re a developer, there’s probably someone trying to get your email to send you a LinkedIn message right… Read More
In a previous post, I explained how to monitor phone calls sent with the Twilio API in real time using call progress events. These allow you to set up a webhook url to receive a request whenever the status of your phone calls change. The real time updates of call progress events provide us with a great opportunity to play around with websockets. In this post I am… Read More
When handling phone calls with TwiML, you have many options for controlling the caller’s experience. You can <Say> something in a robot voice, <Dial> other numbers into the call and even <Record> the call. My personal favorite is the ability to play audio files over the phone using the <Play> TwiML verb. You can even create your own version of Dial-A-Song, a hotline run by the band They Might Be Giants that… Read More
Who doesn’t love XKCD? I know I do. The comic appeals to us engineers since it draws humor from some of the nerdiest math and science subjects. As much as I love to read XKCD, it frequently gets lost in the many RSS feeds in my reader which means I miss new comics as they are published. When Twilio released support for MMS on US and… Read More