
TwilioQuest, a new way to learn Twilio - gregorymichael
https://www.twilio.com/blog/2017/10/twilioquest-fastest-way-to-learn-twilio.html
======
leonroy
I attended Twilio’s Signal conference and they had Twilio Quest running at
their hackathon.

As the head of my little startup I was supposed to schmooze and attend all the
biz type talks - what did I do instead for the entire morning? I spent it on
the Twilio Quest hackathon coding away.

Haven’t had that much fun coding since college. Could not believe Twilio put
so much effort into what I assumed would be a small side show at their
conference.

This kind of commitment is incredibly impressive and really endears developers
and technical users who see this side of Twilio. I even think it has
applications outside of Twilio as a teaching tool if it could be frameworked
up and open sourced.

Incredibly impressed by Quest and so tempted to see if I can improve my score!

~~~
godzillabrennus
Now you made me want to spend time playing it :-)

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schnevets
It seems so strange to have such a polished initiative on a niche project like
Twilio. I can understand this for AWS, JavaScript Libraries, or SalesForce,
but nobody's job title is exclusively "Twilio Engineer".

Then again, the team was always notably helpful during hackathons, and their
documentation is usually on point. Maybe they recognize this as a company
strength, and they are harnessing it as a way to compete with the likes of
AWS/Google Cloud.

~~~
iguana
I'm basically a twilio engineer now. I do a lot of telephony, but no one wants
to run and scale their own stack, so everyone ends up building against REST
apis. Twilio has some of the best features around reliably placing calls,
sending texts, and the most enjoyable developer experience of any api I've
ever used, including outside of telephony. I've built a 100% serverless
contact center, among other things. Twilio Sync RT infra is also fantastic.
Their WebRTC service was total shit through 2014 but is better now.

~~~
malloryerik
Would you use their WebRTC offering, or is there a better alternative?

~~~
iguana
Sure, I'd use it, but under the following conditions:

\- wired ethernet

\- lots of guard code that reconnects failed calls

\- customer is aware they will not get 5 9's or even 3 9's.

Typically using WebRTC means a significant cost savings, so it may or may not
be worthwhile to build out the additional stuff needed to make it work.

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kovacs
I remember this from Twilio-con in 2014 or so. TwilioQuest was easily the best
session I've ever had at a conference. It looks like they took that and went
even further. What a fun project to work on! I wish every conference session
was as well polished. To me this one is the gold standard, or maybe on HN the
bitcoin standard, of conference sessions. Approachable, engaging, educational,
and entertaining.

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Animats
I'm amazed at how big Twilio has become. I just thought of them as operating a
useful gateway between the Internet and the SS7 network. I've used it for
inbound SMS, for which it works fine. The API is simple enough. I used to do
SMS via Google Voice and a Python program, which was awful. (It did take three
years of nagging to get inbound multipart SMS support on Twilio, but they
finally implemented that.)

Now they're moving into customer relationship management. They may end up
competing with Salesforce.

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raymondgh
When your service is a commodity, consumers choose by price and ease of
integration. This is a great way to make the choice easy

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clevergadget
Does anyone know any other apps that have done similar things? Gamification
really pays off for me - but I have no interest in Twilio hehe. I'm familiar
with habitica, not what I'm looking for

~~~
wmil
Ruby Warrior?

[https://www.bloc.io/ruby-warrior#/](https://www.bloc.io/ruby-warrior#/)

~~~
downrightmike
Maxed out auto-play audio on homepage warning

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hectorlorenzo
This reminds me of Braintree and their hidden games in the source code. They
used to have it some time ago: there were some links and instructions in the
source code that you could use to access some URLs with classic videogames,
Braintree themed.

This "little" details make developers take the company more seriously,
somehow: "If they make the effort to develop this just to make developers
smile, they must be extra committed to their code and their API quality". Not
sure if true, but it's an effective strategy. Kudos to them.

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productboy
One of our startups is in a tough, low tech. market [in the USA]. On a tight
budget we had to deliver robust SMS based features fast to meet customer
expectations. It would have sucked the ocean to build Twilio's stack from
scratch then use it hoping we got it right the first time. As someone else
said: "the most enjoyable developer experience of any api I've ever used" is
why we signed up and haven't looked back.

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Dowwie
This was clearly a labor of love. You've taken gamification to a whole-nuva-
level.

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ben_jones
Obviously we don't know the full context, maybe this was a super quick side
project that the developer(s) had a blast doing. But I would've preferred they
spent time improving documentation, writing first-class client libraries for
more languages ( _cough_ Golang), or you know the API itself - which last time
I checked had the string "2010-04-01" hardcoded into it.

Naysaying aside i'll give it a shot if I'm ever using Twilio again. Haven't
seen API providers really push the barrier in learning materials - could work.

~~~
crabasa
I'm curious about the comment on API versioning. If it instead had the string
"/v1/" embedded in the URL, would this be preferable to you? Which APIs do you
feel are in need of updating?

Disclaimer: former Twilio PM.

~~~
ben_jones
So pointing out the API versioning scheme was disingenuous. It's as good as
any other scheme and is probably necessary for backwards compatibility... it
just seems old. I'll divide my short feedback into three categories:

API Features that I feel should be there but aren't:

\- CRUD operations for Copilot

\- Bulk operations for SMS/MMS - seriously one request per?

\- CRUD operations and better access for logging and billing in general. The
UI does not suffice.

User Interface:

\- You did a huge redesign ~2 years ago that was frankly underwhelming. It
added some SPA like functionality splattered through out the site, and many of
the operations, like adding numbers to a Twilio Copilot service, became slow
and buggy.

\- Good artists copy and great artists steal. SaaS products at GCP, AWS,
Stripe, aren't necessarily perfect but can all be drawn from to create a
better product. I honestly feel like most of the innovation at Twilio clocked
out ~4 years ago and now its just maintenance work and annual reboots. Though
this project shows innovation its far away from the core concerns of
customers. We know how to use the platform already...

Generic:

\- Better documentation

\- More transparency for how carriers handle SMS once Twilio passes it off

\- More transparent pricing. I.e. if I send a 1600 character text I'm getting
billed ~10 times or whatever - not great.

EDIT: Finally because Twilio is a billion dollar business I hold it to a much
higher standard then I did ~5 years ago. I don't mean to discourage
hardworking employees who mean well, just as a former employee of a not
insignificant customer I have some residual entitlement and frustrations.

~~~
blhack
>\- You did a huge redesign ~2 years ago that was frankly underwhelming. It
added some SPA like functionality splattered through out the site, and many of
the operations, like adding numbers to a Twilio Copilot service, became slow
and buggy.

Not only to the developer portal/backend, but to the documentation as well.

It went from something that was really straightforward and easy to use, to
something that feels like you have to fight it to find what you want. I'm
really curious what happened, or why this design decision was made.

It's honestly bad enough that imho there is space for somebody with a better
UI/documentation to move in and compete on that.

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RIMR
Chiming in late to say that I love TwilioQuest and I plan to max out my EXP
because I just learned more about Twilio since this went live than I
understood in the year I have been toying with it.

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tschellenbach
This is pretty funny :) Not the easiest way to learn how to use their product,
but fun :)

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leesalminen
Please work on your Programmable Fax API. It's a mess right now with 40% of
inbound faxes having a status of "failed" with no additional information. Yes,
I get that it's a beta (for many months now) but not showing a descriptive
error message? C'mon!

