Summer school just ended which means - school's out, scream and shout! Kids are enjoying their remaining weeks of summer before starting back again.

Oh how I miss being a kid with forced breaks and recess time. Recently I visited an elementary school during their summer session and felt the nostalgia of being an innocent kid. Life was so simple when the main concern was having enough time to be cool and not get caught passing notes across the classroom! Since I grew up in a low-income community, I decided to give back and show the classrooms a fun presentation on what it's like to work in the tech industry and write code!

With the help of Twilio and the command line, I was able to show the elementary school students how to feel like a hacker by typing some lyrics on the computer, pressing a few buttons, and …

One of the most critical elements of delivering high-quality healthcare is an efficient scheduling and appointment management process. In the US alone, missed appointments cost the healthcare system $150B each year. Appointment outreach is an easy and cost-effective way to reduce no-shows, yet many available solutions for sending out these reminders are batched, delayed, and lack flexibility.

Twilio is focused on helping you find a solution that overcomes these challenges and best fits your needs! If your organization is exploring building an in-house solution, Twilio’s real-time Messaging API can be integrated with your Electronic Health Record (EHR) …

Twilio suffered a significant service disruption on Feb 26, 2021.

When we fall short, as we did with the service disruption on Feb 26, it motivates us to learn and to make our services more resilient and reliable. Nothing is more important than regaining your trust. We want the opportunity to show that Twilio can and will continue to be a reliable and consistent partner.

We are committed to you that when an incident occurs that disrupts your customer communications, we will always tell you about it. “No shenanigans” is our ethos. Striving to act in an honest, direct, and transparent way is a value every Twilion lives by - and in that spirit, we want to share our Q2 improvements that we’ve completed.

Recap of the Feb 26, 2021 service disruption:

On Friday, February 26, 2021, one of Twilio's internal services suffered a service disruption that impacted a broad …

Using Twilio's Super Network, you can quickly buy phone numbers from around the world. You can even specify a specific area code to buy a phone number that is local to a certain state, territory, or region.

With Twilio Voice, you can quickly integrate voice communication into your applications. For the application in this tutorial, you'll use Twilio phone numbers, Twilio Voice, and Twilio Functions to create a proxy phone number!

What do I mean by a proxy phone number? Before explaining that, I will discuss a similar concept. In web development, there's a concept of "reverse proxies". When you send HTTP requests to a reverse proxy, the reverse proxy forwards the traffic to a web server on a private network. This way the web server still serves a website but isn't exposed directly to the internet adding benefits like security, performance enhancements, and much more.

Similarly, …

Introduction

Sitting at your device all day waiting for a price drop can be a cumbersome task. A price notifier will ensure that you never miss out on your most coveted item. Whether you’re looking for the hottest pair of shoes or a couch for your living room, it can all be automated to your benefit and make technology work for you.

In this article, you will learn how to build an SMS price notifier. To do this, you’ll use the Sneaks API to track sneaker prices and deliver SMS alerts whenever the price of a particular sneaker decreases.

This article is divided into two parts: The first will show how to build a basic SMS handler and the second will show how to build an SMS scheduler to send price alerts to subscribers.

Prerequisites

Here is what you will need to follow along with this article:

• Node.js installation
• A …

There has recently been an explosion of audio chat applications lately. Clubhouse, which allows a user to join on-going audio conversations or start a conversation that others can join, launched in April 2020 and has seen explosive growth. Other companies have also shipped audio chat products or announced they are working on them. Twitter launched Twitter spaces and many are following suit. Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack, Spotify are among companies that have confirmed they will be introducing live-audio features in the future.

In this tutorial we will cover building an audio chat application using Django and React by leveraging the Twilio Programmable Voice API to allow us to make conference calls from the browser.

Requirements

• Python 3.6 or higher: If you don’t have it installed, get it here.
• Node.js and yarn: If you don't have them installed, install them before starting the tutorial.
• Twilio account: If you are new …

Django comes with a lightweight server that allows you to serve your project on your local machine at http://localhost:8000. This is a great way to test and troubleshoot your application code.

Your local server isn't exposed to the real Internet, though, so your Django project can't receive requests from an external source, such as a Twilio webhook.

For development purposes, you may need to test that your app code properly handles requests from external sources. To do that, you must expose your app to the Internet.

What is ngrok?

The ngrok utility generates public URLs that map to your local server, enabling you to test how your development code handles requests from external sources. Read more about ngrok and how it works in the official documentation.

Prerequisites

All you need for this tutorial is an existing Django project running on Python 3.

Install the pyngrok package

The …

Phone numbers are a very common part of user profiles in modern applications. For example, they let users receive an OTP (One Time Password) to log in to an account or receive a recovery code when they can't access their second-factor device, and they let support staff contact a customer when there is suspicious activity on their account.

However, how often do we check that the phone number which users store in their profiles is genuine? Today, I'm going to show you how to do it in plain PHP using Twilio's Lookup API—no framework required!

Tutorial requirements

To follow this tutorial you'll need three things:

• PHP 7.4.
• A free Twilio account. If you are new to Twilio, click here to create a free account now and receive a $10 credit when you upgrade to a paid account.
• Composer installed globally.

Create the project directory and install the …

Working from home. Sharing makeshift office spaces with roommates or partners, or noisy kids, or needy pets. Zoom fatigue. Too many meetings. Wouldn’t it be great if we all had some time to think?

Well, Twilio did just that. We’re just coming out of one big company-wide “Think Week” that took place globally from July 5-9. And, as Twilio is in the midst of a hiring spree with hundreds of jobs open for developers, managers, and sales professionals, we wanted to give potential candidates a feel for how Twilio is listening to employees and making room for thinking.

What is Think Week?

Twilio's Think Week is a global initiative during which Twilions everywhere get to focus on whatever is important to them without the disruption of internal meetings. It's an opportunity to reflect on the first half of the year, determine where they are with their BPMs (our acronym for …