The COVID-19 crisis grounded corporate travel and forced companies to cancel their conferences, which left Amber Case stuck at home.

The Portland-based author, researcher, and speaker traveled regularly for work, and she enjoyed vacations when she wasn’t on the job. However, with lockdowns set to extend well into the summer, it looked as though she likely wouldn’t be going anywhere anytime soon.

Then, one day, she received an email from collaborator Ben Greenstein.

“He sent me this email that said ‘Hi, this is B. Greenstein from Hypothetitech. Congratulations! You have won 10 hypothetical vacations,’” Case said.

Case could call at any time, the offer said, to experience a Choose Your Own Adventure style hypothetical vacation over the phone. With Greenstein proving the pacing and direction of the overall narrative, she could go on, say, a road trip or a vacation in the desert, and she could choose what to do …

Offering two-factor authentication (2FA) doesn't help secure your customers if they don't opt in to the feature. 2FA helps protect users if the first factor, usually a password, is compromised. Compromise is common for easy to guess passwords and for reused passwords that are breached on another site. The most security conscious users may already have strong, unique passwords and may not need to be convinced to enable 2FA, so how do you convince the most vulnerable users to turn on additional security features?

A 2019 study on 2FA usability found that only 29% of people thought the inconvenience of 2FA was always worth the security tradeoff. "I just don’t think I have anything that people would want to take from me, so I think that’s why I haven’t been very worried about it," one participant noted.

This sentiment reflects something the security researcher Cormac Herley wrote about a decade …

Congratulations to Synergy Enterprise Solutions for introducing ​Synergy Fusion, a fully customizable omnichannel cloud contact center powered by Twilio Flex.​ Synergy Enterprise Solutions, a leading contact center and CRM solutions provider based in Australia and New Zealand developed Fusion to help businesses streamline customer service and communications.  

Introducing New Business Models With Twilio Flex

Twilio Flex gives businesses complete control over how, when and what they deploy. Built on the trusted Twilio cloud communications infrastructure that powers over a half-million agents today. With Twilio Flex, as the industry's only fully programmable platform, Twilio Flex lets businesses deploy Twilio's broad array of channels while giving developers the tools they need to easily create, change, or extend any part of the solution.

Twilio Flex is changing the way enterprise software is being consumed. Its programmable platform provides a unique opportunity for developers, entrepreneurs and innovative organizations to develop new customer service software …

In this tutorial, I’ll be showing you how to build a Laravel group chat application with admin moderation using Twilio Programmable Chat.

Prerequisites

In order to follow this tutorial, you will need the following:

• Composer and Laravel Installer (v2.3.0 and above) installed on your local machine
• Basic knowledge of the Laravel Framework
• Basic knowledge of Vue.js
• A Twilio account

What We’ll Be Building

For the purpose of this tutorial, we’ll be building a group chat, where an admin will be able to perform the following tasks:

• Ban members in a group
• Unban members in a group
• Remove members from a group

Getting Twilio Credentials

Login to your Twilio dashboard and copy both your Account SID …

According to the CDC, contact tracing is a critical part of a multi-pronged approach to fight COVID-19. Contact tracing requires public health departments to:

• Educate COVID-19 patients on the virus and interview them to identify close contacts
• Notify these contacts that they may have been exposed and should start isolating
• Monitor the ongoing symptoms and isolation measures of patients and their contacts

When implemented effectively, contact tracing can lessen the impact of COVID-19 by lowering mortality rates and allowing people to safely return to work. That’s why most city and state leaders have identified scalable contact tracing programs as key milestones to reopen their economies.

We’re here to help.

Twilio is working with public health departments and their tech partners around the globe, including New York City Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications and GovTech in Singapore, to launch and scale communications for contact tracing. Reach out to us …

One-time passwords (OTPs) contain numeric or alphanumeric codes that are used to provide an extra layer of security for your applications, by ensuring that a user is authenticated for a particular transaction or a login session. In this tutorial, we’ll be building a simple Flask application that generates and validates OTPs that are delivered to users via Voice or SMS channels using Twilio.

Technical requirements

To follow along, you’ll need the following:

• A free Twilio Account. If you use this link to register, you will receive $10 credit when you upgrade to a paid account.
• Python 3.6 or newer.
• A phone line that can receive voice calls and/or SMS.

Creating a Python environment

Let’s create a directory where our project will reside. From the terminal, run the following command:

Next, cd into the project directory and run the following command to create a virtual environment.

Are you a developer looking for a new hobby that’s compatible with sheltering in place? Would you like to be able to share it with friends from a virus-safe distance?

You can stargaze from the safety of your own lawn, balcony, or roof, and you don’t need any equipment other than your own eyes, and maybe a pair of binoculars. There are plenty of bright objects in the night sky that are visible with the naked eye. One of them is the International Space Station (ISS), which is the third brightest object in the sky after the sun and moon.

The ISS whips around the earth at 27,576 kilometers per hour (17,000 miles per hour), making a complete orbit every 94 minutes. Opportunities to observe it only last a few minutes, so it’s helpful to know when the ISS will be visible and from which direction it will appear.

You …

Requirements

In order to complete this tutorial you will need the following:

• A Twilio account. If you don’t have one yet, you can use this link and get an extra $10 in Twilio credit when you upgrade.
• A Twilio Phone number. You can follow this short how-to on purchasing a number if you do not already have one.

Build an App with No Code in Twilio Studio

Twilio Studio is a drag-and-drop editor that allows you to build Twilio apps and host them in the cloud. …

In the age of impending climate catastrophe, it is important now more than ever to respect the rights and sovereignty of Native people worldwide. Recognizing the traditional stewards of the land by making land acknowledgements at events or gatherings is a vital first step towards inserting an awareness of Indigenous presence and land rights into everyday life.

This kind of thing has been becoming a bit more commonplace at developer conferences such as JSConf US and PyCascades.

Using Native Land Digital, an Indigenous-led, in-progress project dedicated to helping people learn more about their local traditional Indigenous territories, I created a text messaging bot for people who are on the go to quickly find out which Native territory a given address exists on.

Try it by texting an address to +1 (331) 244-LAND (+1 331 244 5263).

By texting "101 Spear Street" for example, we can see that …