2nd
Twilio Contest
So sometime earlier this year I found a service called Twilio that I thought was pretty cool. They offer a service that basically makes it really easy for web app developers to offer telephone based features. Not mobile features, like iPhone apps- actual honest-to-goodness POTS features. Hit a URL, and your phone rings. Answer it, and it will speak to you in a soft robot voice. Dial a number, and Twilio makes a request to a web service.
Naturally, I spent the morning coding up a really simple demo app. It didn’t do much, but I was impressed by the simplicity and power of the API. Then, I wrote a program to prank call Lane.
A couple weeks later, I read that Twilio was running a weekly contest over the summer. Each week has a new theme, and the coolest app each week wins a netbook. I subscribed to the blog, eager for a theme which inspired a cool idea.
Last week’s theme was Amazon Web Services, which is a concept close to my heart. We use AWS heavily for the app I work on at Palo Alto Software, Email Center Pro, and ECP is all about communication, so it seemed like a natural fit.
I pitched my idea to my manager, and he liked it, so I spent most of the day Friday writing the code for Voice Alerts. It shouldn’t even have taken that long, but there were a few nagging issues I just couldn’t get past. Our ECP API is quite robust, so it was actually pretty easy to add a simple option to output TwiML, the special code that tells Twilio what to say.
I decided just explaining what the feature did wouldn’t be interesting enough, so I resolved to make a video. I grabbed my camera equipment and went in to the office to do some filming. I edited the video down and uploaded it to Youtube on Sunday, just a few hours ahead of the deadline. Normally Jason does our ECP videos, but I think I did alright:
I did some Twitter snooping and found some really interesting competition. I really didn’t think I had much of a chance at winning the competition, but I was happy just to have made an entry. The winner was supposed to have been announced Monday morning, but instead @twilio announced on Twitter that there were SO many entries, they hadn’t picked a winner yet. Tuesday rolled around and still no winner announced. Finally, Tuesday night the blog updated.
I was one of TWO winners! So I’ve got a brand new netbook coming any day now, which is pretty cool. We’ll be launching my new award-winning feature later this week, and I have a feeling I’ll be doing more with Twilio in the future.
