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Maisam Somji
Maisam Somji

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Twilio Hackathon Submission: Walkins-Welcome!

Demo Link

Link to Code

For too many years, we have been waiting around in the lobby waiting for one thing or another, wasting time, while we could be getting other things done until it is our time. Walkins-Welcome solves that problem and a few more!

This application is a proof of concept of providing professional care to people in need during social distancing.

  • The application allows professionals, to login in via their google account and create lobbies for their patients.
  • Patients do not need to login, when they visit the website, they "get in line" and wait for their turn.
  • When the Doctor is ready to communicate, they click on the "Call next patient" button that will initialize their video call room
  • This will lead to the patient receiving a text message on their phone with a link to the video room where the two con converse.

The below image helps with understanding the process a little more:

Wakings Welcome Process

Category Submission:

  • COVID-19 Communications and possibly Engaging Engagements

Technologies used:

  1. React/Redux (client)
  2. Netlify client deployment
  3. serverless (server)
  4. AWS Lambda backend deployments
  5. Mlab (Mongo Database)
  6. Google Auth API
  7. Twilio Video Api
  8. Twilio SMS API
  9. Figma

There were MANY hurdles along the way! I found out about the hackathon pretty late, so this was about a week's worth of work. I used this hackathon as an avenue to exercise my design skills, so most of my time was spent understanding how different colors work together and learning how to layout an application that does not look like it just got into a back-alley fight!

  • This was my fist time working with lambdas in general and serverless was a great tool to get started with! Though getting started was a little bumpy, trying to understand how billing works and ofcourse getting over the fact of how cheap lambdas are, but as I kept working with it, I noticed how much faster I was getting work done with lambdas compared to other alternatives. I certainly see myself using both serverless and netlify more in the future.

One of the issues I faced with serverless was that it maintains some sort of context of what it expects to see in AWS, and if you manually delete things from aws, it can render the tool useless, at-least to deploy to that environment. This is not a deal breaker since environments are arbitrary.

Twilio was quite a ride to say the least! But a fun one, so I am not complaining. I really with I would have been able to use their lambda functions too, but I just couldn't get those to work, and being pressed for time, I decided it would have to wait.

I hope you enjoy Walkins-Welcome as much as I enjoyed building it.

Note to self: Procrastinate less next time!

Top comments (1)

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Maisam Somji

I have created a Room named "Walkins". Get in line and I'll be checking in periodically to provide a real experience of how a doctor would start a conference call with their patient. :)