Upcoming Events: Dallas, Chicago, and Milwaukee

July 07, 2011
Written by
Keith Casey
Contributor
Opinions expressed by Twilio contributors are their own

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While this is pretty short notice, we have a trio of events that may be of interest.

Dallas Drupal Days
First, this weekend July 8-9, I am attending Dallas Drupal Days to talk on a pair of subjects. The first is the new VoIP Drupal module for Drupal 6. Here’s the synopsis:

We are building a highly innovative framework to integrate Drupal sites with touchtone phones and Internet-telephony systems to provide Drupal users with the ability to, among other things:

* Record, send and receive audio messages
* Organize phone-based polls
* Send meeting reminders
* Broadcast emergency announcements
* And much more!

VoIP Drupal will change the way you interact with Drupal, your phone and the web!

My only role in the module so far is a code review and fielding support requests for the lead developer, but the potential is huge.

Next, I’m giving a session “Drupal on Windows” with a specific focus on IIS. I started exploring it recently while writing documentation for Microsoft. As a longtime LAMP developer and generally an Open Source guy, it was odd to enter that space but the tools and options were impressive. If you’re interested, here’s the summary:

While most of us deploy Drupal on a LAMP stack, the vast majority of our development time and effort is spent working on Windows locally. These different environments can make development tricky because most of us don’t have the experience required to tune and optimize this set up. This session will cover the top ten things you can do in a single afternoon to ensure Drupal on IIS is stable and fully functional so you can get on with your job.

FOJN
On Monday July 11, I will be in Chicago to speak at the Future of Jewish Nonprofit Summit. The unique thing about this presentation is the format. I get to sit down with Patty Huber who leads the community initiatives at GroupOn. We’ll cover topics ranging from GroupOn’s history and involvement in communities to her background in Psychology and how it applies, and how you might apply it to your own efforts. It’s a new space for Twilio and me personally, but it should be a great discussion.

If you’re interested, the organizers are offering a one day deal of 50% off.

PHP
Finally, after the conference on Tuesday, July 12, I will make a quick trip up to Milwaukee PHP to speak on “Voice/SMS API  – Using the web without a browser” or my preferred title: “Look Mom, no browser!” Here’s a quick summary:

“Generally, when we design User Interfaces, we think of color, alignment, and pixels. Unfortunately there are times when you can’t use a browser or it just doesn’t make sense. So what if we broke the UI out of the visual realm and into the audio? In this session, we’ll use our phones to both navigate and consume a website. Specifically, we’ll use the Twilio API to connect, explore, and use a website.”

The last time I did the session in Baltimore, we ended up building and integrating Twilio into real live use cases in a matter of minutes and then getting more and more creative and complex to see what we could create. Some things worked, some things just sparked new ideas.

If you are in any of those cities and using Twilio, I’d love to hear from you and what you’re doing with the system. And of course, I’m always looking for feedback. You can shoot me an email or tweet me at @caseysoftware.