Teeboxer Wins Our "Coordinating People" Contest
Time to read: 2 minutes
February 08, 2011
Written by
There were a lot of good entries submitted for last week’s contest, but Teeboxer was our favorite because of its focused approach at solving a unique problem: coordinating golf times amongst busy professionals. Yuri Gadow was tired of battling with schedules, weather, and tee times, so he put Twilio and 19 other APIs to work to make things better. Once registered, users can schedule a tee time and course, add players, and check the weather conditions for that day. Using Twilio’s Voice API, Teeboxer calls to remind players of the tee time, and can optionally send players an SMS with a link to a map to the golf course. See it in action below:
If you’re a golfer that wants to try Teeboxer out, Yuri is giving away 100 private beta invites to Teeboxer to the Twilio community. Get yours here.
For winning the Coordinating People contest, Yuri will receive an Amazon Kindle 3G, $100 in Twilio credit, and some cool Twilio swag. Congrats, Yuri!
What technologies are you using to build/support it?
According to Github, Teeboxer is 61% Ruby, 37% Javascript, and 2% shell script. I started with Ruby 1.8 and Merb on Heroku. Today Teeboxer is in Rackspace’s Cloud running Rails3 and Ruby 1.9 on Ubuntu. Regenerable data lives in memcached and Redis while PostgreSQL is the store of record and the queues run on Resque. On the front-end it’s all about jQuery and SASS.
Teeboxer relies on over twenty SaaS API’s (yes, that number keeps me up nights.) Twilio was the most straightforward integration (logic-less integrations withstanding, e.g., Hoptoad,) especially considering the large architectural disparity between telecom and web. I’ve done some work integrating web apps with wireless SLEE’s, so seeing how simple Twilio makes it all is amazing (and usually triggers a thought like “better you than me.”)
How did you get started developing with Twilio?
Twilio hit my radar a while back when I was with a startup analyzing ad logs using Amazon’s EC2; keeping a the lookout for other companies using AWS for commercial purposes with real customers and consequences. So it was the natural place for me to turn when I began designing Teeboxer’s SMS capabilities. Twilio’s voice capabilities where a nice surprise. I hadn’t planned on doing much voice beyond a few taster features to gauge user interest. But, in testing it’s been quite popular and I expect I’ll be doing a lot more with voice for people on the move.
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