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Launch your own video app with text-based chat in minutes with the updated Twilio Video Open Source ReactJS application
Read MoreLast year, Twilio launched quick deploy video applications for developers to get up and running with Programmable Video in five minutes or less. Today, we are excited to announce the latest enhancement to the open source ReactJS application: out-of-the-box chat support for textual and file-based messaging.
Whether you are using the app as a launching off point or a canonical reference during development, by adding this feature to the open source ReactJS application we hope to accelerate your development as you look to build chat within your video experience.
This post will first explore why chat is a valuable channel for the end-user video experience, introduce the new feature, and discuss what we used to build it (spoiler alert: we leveraged Twilio’s very own Conversations API).
Why add chat into your video experience?
Chat within the video experience provides a useful channel for users to send clarifying messages, backlog …
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Snyk-Watcher: Keep Snyk in Sync
Read MoreThe product security team at Twilio is responsible for securing all applications built by Twilio. We work with Engineering teams to help secure Twilio and our customers. We use Snyk, a cloud native application security platform, to make sure our code is secure at all stages of design and deployment.
Automation is the key to building security at scale, because it eliminates human error. When we automate, we catch more vulnerabilities. Snyk scans repositories automatically—that is, as long as you’ve told Snyk which ones to scan.
We needed a way to automate the process of keeping Snyk up to date with projects in our SCM, detecting when repositories are added, deleted, or renamed and configuring Snyk automatically.
We created Snyk-Watcher, a Github App that listens to webhooks on the main branch for repository changes and pull requests. When a pull request is merged to main, Snyk-Watcher imports the project …
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Twilio partners with Google and Apple to stop COVID-19 with Exposure Notifications
Read MoreOne year into the COVID-19 pandemic, there’s light at the end of the tunnel, with multiple vaccines getting approved in countries around the world. At the same time, global infection rates are near all time highs due to winter seasonality, emerging virus variants, lockdown fatigue, and challenges in public compliance with public health guidelines.
While there’s good reason for optimism as vaccine distribution accelerates, inoculating 7 billion people will take time. That’s why it’s still essential that we take all available precautionary measures now and in the months to come. It’s also why Twilio is partnering with Google and Apple to power SMS messaging for Exposure Notifications.
Contact tracing that protects your privacy
Exposure Notifications is an open source API framework for contact tracing. The software uses Bluetooth to anonymously track human proximity and notify people if they are exposed to COVID-19.
Here’s how it works. Using short strings …
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An Update to Deploying Video Apps
Read MoreAhoy!
What an incredible journey it’s been since we released our Video collaboration apps earlier this year. To date, we have observed thousands of deployments, collaborated on hundreds of Github issues, and helped many developers accelerate their Programmable Video solutions to market.
Today we are excited to announce an important update to the collaboration apps and the Twilio CLI RTC plugin intended to help developers deploy more Video!
Passcode Update
Deploying a Video app with version 0.1.x of the RTC plugin results in a 10 digit passcode being generated. Reference the following example output.
$ twilio rtc:apps:video:deploy --authentication passcode --app-directory /path/to/app deploying app... done Web App URL: https://video-app-1111-dev.twil.io?passcode=1111111111 Passcode: 1111111111Starting with 0.2.0, the RTC plugin increased the length of the passcode from 10 digits to 14. Reference the following updated output.
$ twilio rtc:apps:video:deploy --authentication passcode --app-directory /path/to/app deploying app... done Web App URL: https://video-app-xxxx-xxxx-dev.twil.io?passcode=xxxxxxxxxxxxxx Passcode: xxx xxx xxxx … -
Sending SMS from GitHub Actions
Read MoreAt GitHub Universe 2019, GitHub announced that Actions have been moved into General Availability. We are very excited about this launch and as part of it have launched the Twilio SMS for GitHub Action. In this blog post we'll look at how you can get started with that and some use cases for it.
Getting Started
You can find the Twilio SMS Action in the GitHub Marketplace. Before using it, you'll need a Twilio account. Sign up for free to get your account details.
Once you have an account, we'll need two additional things.
Get a phone number
If you haven't gotten a phone number yet, head over to the Phone Numbers section of the Twilio Console and select your preferred phone number. Make sure it has SMS capabilities enabled.
Once you have that phone number, make sure to note it down somewhere. We'll need it later when …
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Architecting your Open Source Culture with Governance
Read MoreWhen an open source project first blinks its eyes open into the wider world, maintainers are often focused on nurturing its initial growth across a small variety of dimensions. These focal points are necessary and key for building a successful open source project, but once it reaches a certain scale, new considerations come into play.
What problems are we trying to solve?
Open source is, at its core, about people, and about orienting them around a project such that everyone is cognizant of and working to align on the direction that they want the project to head. A project’s culture is a reflection of the people who populate its ranks and the processes it has set out to guide the choices it makes both technically and non-technically. When your project is growing and it’s clear people are engaged, how do you ensure that your project is on a growth track …
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Thank you to over 1000 Contributors!
Read MoreFor a lot of developers the first pull request to an open-source project can be the most intimidating one. It often gets even more intimidating if it is your very first pull request to open source in general. For that reason we decided this year to create the Open Pixel Art project with the aim to teach people how to create their first pull request. Today we are happy to have reached a first big milestone with the project.
Thank you for all your contributions!
In the first 4 weeks of the project over 1000 developers have gotten their pull requests merged into the Open Pixel Art project.
A lot of them did not stop by contributing a pixel to the canvas, they added new functionality that let …
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How to Hacktoberfest: Tips and tricks for maintaining your repo and your mental health
Read MoreHacktoberfest can be both a wonderful and hectic time depending on the onslaught (or lack thereof) pull requests that you get within the month of October. Having been a maintainer myself of a somewhat popular repository for going on three years now, I’d like to share some of our learnings with you so you can make the most of Hacktoberfest and hopefully enjoy yourself in the process.
Ready, set, hack!
There are plenty of quotes on the internet about preparation being the key to success, and you know what? They’re right! A little bit of preparation on your part before October 1st can make a world of difference in how the month goes. Here are a few suggestions for ways you can prepare your repository and make it welcoming to all contributors:
- Make sure your README is up to date. This saves you and your contributors time in the long …
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Introducing Twilio's SOCless: Automated Security Runbooks
Read MoreHow can an organization’s security team defend its customers against threats at scale?
When the Twilio Security Operations team (SecOps) was founded, this challenge weighed heavily on our minds. We knew that automating all our threat investigation and response procedures would be key to safeguarding our customers, but we had no clue where to begin. We also knew that many of our peers were in the same boat.
That’s why today, we’re proud to open-source SOCless: a serverless framework to help organizations easily automate their security workflows and respond to threats quickly and at scale.
To get started with SOCless, visit the documentation at https://twilio-labs.github.io/socless/
Building automated security runbooks
When performing investigations and responding to threats, security professionals follow well-documented, pre-planned, step by step procedures. We call these procedures runbooks.
A typical runbook may require a security professional to use multiple security products, custom scripts, and decision trees to …
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Designing and Enforcing Codes of Conduct
Read MoreIt's 2019 and the issue by now seems to be mostly settled: Codes of Conduct, as it turns out, are an important tool for any community to promote inclusion and protect their members from harassment that would otherwise distract them or push them away.
But what's the actual experience of designing one, and more importantly, enforcing one?
I was an admin on lgbtq.technology, a community Slack for LGBTQ+ members of the tech industry, for over two years. It had a couple of thousand members, with several hundred active across scores of channels. It was (and still is!) a vibrant community that brought together fairly wide representation of individuals.
In this article, I'll go over the story of how community management evolved in this particular community. Along the way, I'll share various hard-earned lessons myself and the rest of the admin team there learned about how to effectively manage a diverse …
We're standing on the shoulders of giants. Software isn’t — and shouldn’t be — a zero-sum game. Collaboration binds communities together. Open Source helps all of us build more powerful services, faster than ever before.
At Twilio, we're always on the lookout for ways we can help keep that innovation going and pay it forward. Learn what we’ve been up to, and how you can contribute.
Code of Conduct
Your safety and comfort are important to us. Codes of Conduct let everyone know what’s expected, so we can do a better job of interacting with one another. All contributions to and interactions with Twilio's open-source projects have to adhere to our Code of Conduct.
You can report violations at open-source@twilio.com.
We believe that a Code of Conduct is important to create welcoming open-source communities. If you want to learn more about adding a Code of Conduct to your projects check out the Open Source Guides or the Covenant Code of Conduct.
Projects
Whatever your skill level might be, we have a variety of projects you can contribute to. Coding isn’t required, either. We love documentation improvements and bug reports. Here are a few projects you might want to check out:
Guardrail
Guardrail is a code generation tool, capable of reading from OpenAPI/Swagger specifications and generating principled code with an emphasis on quality and maintainability. Unlike many code generators, you are encouraged to not commit generated code, preferring to regenerate from your specification so it never gets out of date.
SOCless
SOCless is a serverless framework built to help security teams easily automate their incident response and operations workflows.
Twilio CLI
Our Node.js & oclif powered Twilio CLI to interact with Twilio directly from the command-line.
Flex Plugin Builder
Includes the code for create-flex-plugin and other tooling needed to build plugins for Twilio Flex.
Serverless Toolkit
A collection of tools to locally develop, debug, and deploy Twilio Functions.
Developer Experience (DX) Automator
This tool is intended to help make managing multiple Github repositories much easier for DX, DevRel, and Open Source Engineering teams.
Hackpack v4
With the fourth version of our Hackpack we decided to build an open-source hackable badge powered by the Raspberry PI Zero. You can find both the hardware specs as well as the firmware on our GitHub for you to build your own or modify our existing ones.
Hackpack Firmware on GitHub Hackpack Hardware on GitHub
You can find more projects at:
Podcast: Some Coding Required
Some Coding Required is a podcast about all things open source. Hosted by Twilio SendGrid’s Senior Developer Experience Engineer, Elmer Thomas. Episodes will share answers to questions from the open source community, industry news, efficiency-focused hacks and apps, deep dives on open source topics, and more.
Listen to it on SoundCloud Listen to it on Apple Podcasts
Contributing to Open Source for the First Time
Entering the world of Open Source and contributing to a project for the first time can be intimidating. In order to help you get comfortable with your first contribution, we created a mission in our Twilio Quest system that will guide you through it.
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