dev.to staff

Posted on Apr 2, 2020

Twilio Hackathon Help Thread

#twiliohackathon

The awesome Twilio team will be making themselves available to help people who runs into issues or have questions related to their products as part of the Twilio Community Hackathon.

You are encouraged to comment in this thread for asynchronous assistance. We've also set up a dedicated DEV Connect group channel for more synchronous help. To join the Connect group, just leave a comment in this thread asking to be added.

Twilio will be hosting office hours in Connect 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 https://twitch.tv/twilio, starting on April 2 at 4-6pm PDT.

If you'd like to share more general progress that you're making on your project, you can do so in the community update thread!

Oldest comments (136)

Peter Kim Frank • Apr 2 '20

👋 Can I be added to the help channel onDEV Connect?

(just leaving this comment as an example)

Michael Tharrington • Apr 6 '20

If it's taking a bit for us to add you, please feel free to @mention me and I'll help as quickly as I can!

Yufan Lou • Apr 2 '20

👋 Can I be added to the help channel on DEV Connect?

Waleed • Apr 2 '20

👋 Can I be added to the help channel onDEV Connect?

Thomas Bnt ☕ • Apr 2 '20 • Edited

Hello 👋🏼😊
Can be added to the help channel onDEV Connect?

Bernard Baker • Apr 2 '20

Can I be added to the help channel on DEV Connect?

Sachin • Apr 2 '20

Can I be added to the help channel on DEV Connect?

Xuan • Apr 2 '20

👋 Can I be added to the help channel onDEV Connect?

Abreeza Saleem • Apr 2 '20

Can I be added to the help channel onDEV Connect?

Michael Lustig - halfjew22@gmail.com • Apr 2 '20

Can I be added to the help channel on DEV Connect?

Michael Lustig - halfjew22@gmail.com • Apr 2 '20

Request for async assistance:

Can someone help me out here?

I'm using this library to download a video: github.com/fent/node-ytdl-core

I need to save the video to a file in order to make some modifications. I'm having trouble saving the response of the call to download a video without using the piping operator.

I think the read call is returning a byte array, but can't tell from the method signature. Could someone point me in the right direction here?

  const readable = ytdl(shortVideoUrl);

  await new Promise(res => {
    readable.addListener("readable", () => {
      console.log(`index::20: entering`);
      const foo = readable.read();
      if (!foo) {
        console.log(`index::23: no here`);
      }
      console.log("index::21: foo.length:", foo.length);
      const file = fs.createWriteStream("shortvid.flv");
      file.write(foo);
    });
  });

Alternately, if there is a way to get information about the progress of the write when using the pipe operator, that would be great too. Thanks!

Phil Nash • Apr 3 '20

To get info about the progress it looks like you can listen to the progress event on the readable. Something like:

readable.addEventListener('progress', (chunkByteLength, totalBytesDownloaded, totalBytes) => {
  console.log(`Downloaded ${totalBytesDownloaded} out of ${totalBytes}`);
})

I haven't used this library though, so I might be wrong. Hope it helps!

Michael Lustig - halfjew22@gmail.com • Apr 3 '20

Hey Phil thanks a lot for the reply. That definitely works if I wasn't using the pipe operator, but without doing so, I don't know how to create the file from the array of bytes.

At any rate, I actually switched to Python and it's made my life a little easier.

Phil Nash • Apr 3 '20

Ah! Because it's a readable stream it will emit the data event with chunks of the data which you can write into your writable stream. Something like this should work:

const file = fs.createWriteStream("shortvid.flv");
const readable = ytdl(shortVideoUrl);
readable.addEventListener('data', chunk => {
  file.write(chunk);
});
readable.addEventListener('progress', (chunkByteLength, totalBytesDownloaded, totalBytes) => {
  console.log(`Downloaded ${totalBytesDownloaded} out of ${totalBytes}`);
})
readable.addEventListener('end', () => {
  file.end();
});

But, if you've switched to Python and you're happy with that, then that's cool too!

Michael Lustig - halfjew22@gmail.com • Apr 3 '20

If only the Twilio dev evang team could answer all of my Javascript queries 🤣

So just for my learning opportunity here - when you call file.write(chunk), it's appending those bytes to the file, and calling file.end() will close that file write stream and result in the video file automagically?

Side note about python: It's been awesome to stand up my hack. The last step of adding a message queue (which I thought would be the hardest) has been the easiest. Gotta love learning!

Phil Nash • Apr 3 '20

Yes, that is the gist of it! Using the data and end events of the readable and calling write and end of the writeable is actually the equivalent of using readable.pipe(writeable). But, the documentation suggests you don't want to mix pipe and event based operations and using the progress event would mess that up.

I'm happy to answer JS questions if I can! I just happened to work with other readables/writeables a couple of weeks ago, so it was sort of fresh.

It's good to hear that the Python version has come on nicely for you. I love hackathons for the learning potential!

Michael Lustig - halfjew22@gmail.com • Apr 3 '20

Brilliant! Well I followed you so be expecting some in the future.

Python for whatever reason (or perhaps the competitive nature of the Hackathon) has me more excited about developing than I’ve been in a while, so thanks for that!

And thanks again for your assistance.