We are very excited to announce the first Twilio x DEV community hackathon!
Running through April 30, this contest will be an opportunity to earn community bragging rights, build impactful projects with Twilio, and win sweet prizes. Twilio has some of the most powerful APIs around town, and we are really looking forward to seeing what everyone in the community creates.
Read on for more of the details!
The Twilio APIs
You are allowed to use any of the Twilio APIs in your project. You’re likely already familiar with Twilio’s SMS products, but you might not know that they have a bunch of other awesome products you can leverage for your submission.
So, while you’re very welcome to submit an SMS project, we’re also excited to review and reward entries that leverage programmable voice, video, chat, cross-channel conversations, and the rest of the Twilio products!
Categories
-
COVID-19 Communications: an app to help folks communicate during this challenging time, either to stay connected or to help resolve COVID-19 related challenges.
- Examples: Social interaction apps especially for elderly, remote education tools, distribution of supplies to those in need, telemedicine
-
Engaging Engagements: an app that a company could implement to better engage with their customers or to manage their business.
- Examples: text marketing, fleet management, account notifications, and more -- get more ideas from the Twilio website
-
Interesting Integrations: an app that integrates Twilio with at least one other API.
- Examples: appointment reminders app that uses a scheduling API, sports alert app that uses sports-stat APIs, location-based app that leverages geo-location APIs
Exciting X-Factors: an innovative or unexpected app that doesn’t necessarily fit any of the above categories, but is a clear winner nonetheless.
Prizes 🎁
-
4 Grand Prize Winners (one in each category):
- $1,500 USD gift card or equivalent 💸
- Twilio Swag Pack ($300 value) 😎
- SIGNAL Conference Ticket ($2500 USD value) 🔥
- Your project showcased on Twilio CodeExchange, with a winner badge ✨
- $300 USD credit to the DEV Shop 🎁
- DEV “Twilio Hackathon” winner badge 🏆
-
Runner-up Prizes (10 total):
- $150 USD credit to the DEV Shop 🎁
- Your project showcased on Twilio CodeExchange
- DEV “Twilio Hackathon” runner-up badge 👏
-
Participants (with valid projects):
- $50 USD credit to the DEV Shop 🎁
- DEV “Twilio Hackathon” participation badge 💪
Regardless of whether or not you win, your project may be showcased on Twilio CodeExchange!
How To Participate 👋
In order to submit a valid project, please follow the submission process and rules closely.
How to submit 📨
- Join the Twilio CodeExchange community by filling out their program agreement.
- Document your project journey along the way with the #twiliohackathon tag.
- Submit your project as a DEV post using this suggested template with the #twiliohackathon tag. Please be sure to include the code repository in the post. Embedded live demos, screenshots, and code snippets are also encouraged!
Additional Rules 📝
- You must include at least one Twilio API in your project. Use the promo code DEVHACK20 for $20 when you create your account.
- Your code must be hosted publicly . We prefer GitHub but if you’re using another host (i.e. GitLab, BitBucket), please be sure to include the GitHub username you used to join the Twilio CodeExchange community somewhere in your submission.
- Your repository must have a README with clear setup instructions - here is a sample template.
- Your project must be started and completed between April 2 - April 30.
- Your code must be licensed with a permissive license (i.e. MIT, Apache-2)
- Your project should not have security vulnerabilities or violate security best practices (i.e. hard coded credentials, plain text passwords)
- Your code cannot violate Twilio’s Terms of Service or Acceptable Use Policy
- By making a submission, you agree to the competition's terms.
Community Support 🙋♀️🙋♂️
The Twilio team will be available to help anyone who runs into issues or has questions related to the API. You can reach the Twilio team by leaving a comment in the Twilio Hackathon help thread. We’ll also be setting up a dedicated DEV Connect group channel for more synchronous help. To join this group, just leave a comment in the help thread. This will be a great opportunity to spend time with Twilio’s amazing team, and your fellow community participants.
Twilio will host office hours in that DEV Connect group channel every weekday during the following times:
- Mondays: 3-6pm EDT
- Tuesdays: 3-6pm UTC
- Wednesdays: 3-6pm AEDT
- Thursdays: 3-6pm PDT
- Fridays: 3-6pm EDT
Additionally, Twilio will be hosting a weekly office hours session on their Twitch Channel, starting on April 2 at 4-6pm PDT.
Finally, we have a community update thread where you can share your ideas and gather feedback as you begin making progress on your submission. We encourage you to share your progress along the way to generate more excitement and benefit from additional community feedback suggestions!
Important Dates 🗓
April 2: Hackathon Begins!
April 30: Submission Due at 11:59pm PST.
May 4: Winners Announced!
May 5: Winners Announced!
We hope you have fun, learn some new things, and build something you’re proud of. We can’t wait to see what you build!
Happy Coding!
Latest comments (223)
Who were the winners?
Hey Troy! You can find the winners and runner up winners here:
Announcing: The Twilio Hackathon Winners!
Jess Lee (she/her) ・ May 5 ・ 2 min read
Is anyone excited as I am about May 4th?
Unfortunately we are still in the process of judging and verification and will only announce the winners on Tuesday 😔 sorry for the delay!
Another day of anticipation and excitement 🔥
Upss, May 6 past and I'm exited too like Bernard.
Please, give us news folks.
The winners were announced on the 5th as promised:
Announcing: The Twilio Hackathon Winners!
Jess Lee (she/her) ・ May 5 ・ 2 min read
Hoooooo sorry please, a cache mistake.
Congrats.
OMG last day !!!
I just need to complete my office work hours then i will spend the rest of the day finishing up my project
Good luck!
last day of the hackathon.... 🧰
Hi,
I've just updated my README.md. Can someone take a look and let me know if I've missed anything?
I think it looks good! Didn't test the instructions but on first glance everything looks good
Hi Dominik, a short question, should i mention a category in my submission post? I just post it, and i saw to other participants a Category Mention after "What i build"
Hey Dominik, How can we verify if the project is submitted and valid up to your requirements?
You must include at least one Twilio API in your project. Use the promo code DEVHACK20 for $20 when you create your account.
If i have already an account how to use this code promo ?
Hi Jean Luc! The promo code is unfortunately only for new accounts. You should be able to create a new project to use the code though. That said you also don't have to use the code itself just any Twilio API
Hi Dominik, is my project still valid if i do all in the twilios console?
Can you elaborate a bit more on that? Are you using Twilio Functions or TwiML Bins or what are you doing in the console?
Im using twilio autopilot and twillio functions
You can actually export the Autopilot bot using the Autopilot CLI if you choose to host the code for it on GitHub twilio.com/docs/autopilot/twilio-a...
But yes that's valid to submit :) just make sure for us to be able to do the same things and validate it works
Hi my team and I want to submit our project to the Twilio Hackathon, however, we started it late March but other than that it fulfills all the other conditions. We are using Twilio to give latest info and news to users. We actually got the Twilio $500 grant to keep the service free for the users. We are just interested in helping our users by keeping the service running for free once our credits are done. Here is our website and initative: dev.to/marwan01/covid-19-updates-v... It's all open source, community driven. We even wrote an old dev post about it: dev.to/marwan01/covid-19-updates-v... Please let me know if we are ok to submit or if there is anything we can do. :)
Hey Marouen - Sorry to say. As specified in the hackathon rules your project must be started and completed between April 2 and April 30.
Hi Dominik, Phil, Megan and team
We want to participate on the hackathon (as a team) and have some questions, please:
1- We are finishing a development to aid on COVID-19 emergency in Colombia; an application developed with node.js/Express and SQLServer (DB dependant); the app is all in spanish.
/Question: is this project elegible for the prize? (we may document this on English, but we can not translate the app).
2- The app is intended to join the people finding help with those who wants to help, free of charge and without subscriptions needed. The app has 2 stages: A) front-stage: For final users who find help or wants to help; they login into the system with Cel number and then receives in WhatsApp a code as a password to complete the authentication process, (the code is sent using Twilio Api); after that the user may post requests for help (categorized) and/or may post to help (categorized too); all the matches between people is informed to the parts via Twilio WhatsApp Api. B) back-stage: For administrative users; they login in to the system on a different url, need pre-created user and password, and need to be on the right ROLE (app role); they manage categories, keep the DB info valid (post-moderated info) and on high quality and give support to final users.
/Question: is this project elegible for the prize? all of our code is open but we can not share it for free as a whole; we have no problem with people reading and using our code fragments, but not as a whole.
3- Since the app is DB dependant it can not be run in a server-less env or without a SQL-Server with their respective dbs.
/Question: How can we post or publish this kind of couple of components (code and dbs)?
4- The app will be deployed to AWS services this weekend for testing and demo purposes.
/Question: this testing env is enough for the hackathon?
Thanks in advance and regards.
Mauricio Jaramillo from Colombia
PD: nice API, nice service, waiting for alpha release.
What's up Mauricio. Your project sounds pretty amazing. Let me tackle each question at a time and hopefully this helps.
This should be fine so long as you can document it in accordance with the hackathon rules (i.e. making sure that your README has clear setup instructions to run the project locally).
If I'm understanding your question correctly, it sounds like you won't be able to share all of your project's source code. If the source code you open source fully complies with the hackathon's rules (listed here) then it will apply.
Your project submission does need to be a self contained demo. So if that demo requires the use of a database, can work with a portable DB (i.e. SQLLite) or something of the equivalent, and includes scripts to deploy the database tables, stored procedures, etc, then that would be a valid submission.
There are no explicit rules requiring the use of a specific test environment for the hackathon. So long as your final submission is testable (and can be verified), this should be ok.
Hi Corey
Thanks a lot for the info, very clear for us. We will be "running".
Have a nice day.
Hi Corey
I just posted our project to hackathon, i hope it will be elegible.
Not so much secure, our fist post to DEV.
Best regards.
Do you have to use DEVHACK20 because I don't want to give my debit card details away as it is insecure and I don't want any accidental charges. Also having difficulties buying a number as it asks you for an address.
Hey Emily - You certainly don't have to use the DEVHACK20 promo code to participate in the hackathon. It does provide a $20 credit should you need to upgrade your account, but you can additionally use PayPal to add funds to your account.
Sorry to hear that you're having difficulties buying a number. As mentioned in this support article, there are some places where Twilio is required to collect information about the end user. What are the specific issues you are running into?
Can't we send a local file using Twilio Whatsapp API?
If not, please suggest some workarounds.
If yes, please do tell how to do so.
To send files through the Twilio API for WhatsApp you need to be able to host those files somewhere. When you send a message with a file you need to pass a URL to the API. If you are doing this locally, you could make the files available with a web server on your machine and a tunnel like ngrok that can create a URL that points at your local machine.
Hey all, would love to particiapte in this, seems to be very interesting and working with timelines is the real fun!
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