Are you making progress on your submission for the Twilio Community Hackathon? Let us know what you’re building and how far you’ve gotten!
This thread is for sharing ideas, gathering feedback, and generally just a place for you to get to know your fellow devs.
If you have a big update or just worked through a tough problem, we encourage you to publish a standalone post, but don’t forget to add the #twiliohackathon tag so we can read all about it!
And if you need help with a specific problem, check out our dedicated help thread where the Twilio team is standing by to answer your questions :)
Latest comments (35)
I am working to make an app that send daily SMS to the users with news about COVID.
I have never used Twiliio before so it has been challenging yet fun to learn, and I choose node.js as my server side tool. I am a front-end so I am touching backend for the first time.
Hi! I know I am a little late to the party but I just do not want pass up this opportunity. The project I'd like to make is a simple one. I intend to provide covid19 statistics to an end user via SMS. This will be achieved by connecting to this great, free api (covid19api.com/) to get relevant data. What I want to achieve with this is to help people keep up to date with what is happening when they have limited or no access to the internet. I am hoping I can finish within the allocated time. Any suggestions are welcome. Thanks!
Good luck! Feel free to post so we can follow your journey too 🙂
My idea, which I am half-way through is to build a chatbot, which gives you 2 options. Either to make a confession or to react to someone else's confession. If you choose to submit one, it is stored on server, until someone answers it. If you choose to react to a confession, a confession from the server is fetched for you and once you answer it, the person who submitted it is notified with your answer.
Is it anyhow useful? I don't think so.
Did I learn something along the way so far? A LOT!
Is it fun? Hell, yeah. Finally someone answering my messages immediately 😂.
What do you think?
A few of us have written functions to allow elderly members of our churches to listen to sermon recordings over the phone... either through submitting a standalone MP3 or a URL to an RSS feed:
switchedonnetwork.com/2020/03/18/c...
brightec.co.uk/blog/podcasting-to-...
kiriandsteve.co.uk/playing-a-podca...
I'm happy for the to share my code... but I'm not familiar with github...
Hey Twilio team,
As part of the Global COVID-19 Hackathon, we started a project to try to help local businesses weather the storm of COVID-19.
All local businesses are struggling. Many have set up fundraising campaigns (on GoFundMe or elsewhere), but their clientele has no idea how to find them. We created a website to try to help people find local businesses in their area and offer to support them.
Here's a Work-in-Progress. We are getting there, but have a ways to go:
savesmall.org
Some background:
devpost.com/software/support-local-businesses
The problem is that we need the local business to be able to "claim" their listing so that they can attach their fundraising link. We think the best way to do that is to have Twilio/Verify call the number listed in the public google listings for that company and have someone verify the audio code. Obviously, the Twilio costs at retail price could be extreme if this becomes nationwide or global (which of course is the goal). I would love to put this project into the Twilio hackathon as we complete it.
However, the big question is...can Twilio donate the verifications for this site/cause? I'm sure you guys want to help local businesses as much as we do.
Thanks!
David and Dominik
Save our Small (SOS) businesses!
@twilio
twilio #twiliohackathon
Hi you two! This sounds like a great project. We started a grant for COVID-19 related projects that's referenced on twilio.com/covid that might be worth checking out for your plans :)
Hello, I am working to create a platform where people that produce food locally can make an account using their email and phone number. I want to verify this phone nr is valid firstly and then I will want to send them a code by SMS. In order to do task nr 2, I presume I need a "virtual number" from where I will send the SMS, right?
I tried creating a number from Twilio Dashboard, and I am not allowed. Can you please give me some hints on what I am doing wrong here? Thank you :)
response message: "Trial numbers can't be provisioned to an upgraded account"
That's weird that you can't provision a number. I don't know why you would be seeing that message. Your best bet may be to get in touch with Twilio support to try to sort that out.
On the other hand, if you want to do phone number verification you don't actually need your own number. You can use the Twilio Verify API instead.
Hi, I think this situation occurred when I first created a project in the Twilio dashboard and I didn't select it's for a hackathon AND I live in Romania, where (after documenting about this) I have 0 access to SMS API :) (Wish I had, because this enables other devs - myself included, to create integrations/apps with Twilio in products that can be used locally)
And thanks for the point, of not using my own phone nr, I did add it as an env property so it's not exposed in the code at all, but still, good to know I don't have to altogether. After I changed the type of project, I got a phone nr from the platform, but still using a real nr for SMS testing.
I know that SMS numbers in Romania are not available, but you can still send messages from Twilio using an international number. So if you do need one, you can use a US number (for example) and send your messages from that.
I just submitted my project, was a lot of fun to participate :)
Does everyone who participates win the participation prize?
I'm sketching out a few ideas for a project now.
You have to submit a valid project. And if you are in a team you'll all get the digital participation badge but only one $50 store credit per team
It's great everyone have great ideas and some of them are really awesome. And here I am unable to come up with any ideas after going through Twilio documentation. 😔
While I don't know what I want to build, I do know that I'm not going to use chatting, voice, or video API as I'm not interested.
I'm from South Africa and I've been seeing a lot of fake news recently. I saw an article about people saying they don't want vaccines and that the corona virus isn't really contagious and its just a government ploy to kill off people and they must do everything they can to not get tested (because thats how they get the virus - unbelievable) and vaccinated.
These messages are being passed around so easily and I feel like if people only were better informed it would go a long way to curtailing this.
In light of this I'd like to make a whatsapp bot that you can forward things to and it will tell you whether its fake news or not.
What do you guys think?
I'm kinda overwhelmed with the possibilities and don't know what to do 😅. Currently I'm experimenting Twilio's APIs to see which one will help me build the app that I want... although I haven't figured out completely what that is. I was thinking an app that integrates with slack would be cool. At my job, we use an app called Donut, that matches people to talk, and now that most of us work remote, I think an app that could help you communicate with others is cool.
I find it hard to get topics to talk about, so perhaps the user could ask this bot some topics, maybe gifs to break the ice or something else to get the converstation started 😃.
My base idea will be to extend my Python app I used for restaurants to do the following:
User registers, confirms account via email (integration with Sendgrid API), then I will offer a location-based list of restaurants around you, via the HERE API, and to conclude, will integrate twillio to send an SMS with the opening hours of the restaurants that are closer to your current location :)
The best way to share news or updates is different for every person. Aunt Joanne may love using WhatsApp, but cousin Rick may want a good ol' fashioned phone call. In our case, everyone wants to know when my wife delivers our newborn this summer and we cannot wait to share the good news with everyone! But, with the stress of preparing to be a first-time parent and of course the new normal everyone is adjusting to that is the COVID-19 outbreak, the last thing I want to think about is preparing all the group chats and phone calls we will need to get to everyone.
I will be setting up a website where I can add all my loved ones to a notification list and make sure they all get notified in the way that best works for them. It would be great to leverage an Alexa Skill where I can have Alexa send a notification using Twilio to everyone subscribed while we rush out the door to the hospital.
This framework would be great for other use cases as well. COVID-19 has stressed the importance of digital communication, and any news/announcements that should be shared quickly could benefit from allowing recipients to receive notifications in the way that's best for them.
I want to make the front-end in Javascript, something I have never done but have always wanted to try. For working with the Twilio API, there are a lot of languages with existing SDKs but not an official one for Go! There are some interesting libraries already made in the open source community, but I think it would be fun to use what I know in Go and practice making a simple library myself to interact with the Twilio API.
I'm pleased to join this experience. Thanks Dev & Twilio for providing such a challenge to prototype and explore our ideas and side projects.
I've wrote a post talking about my goals during this Hackathon:
Received; Public bucket for receiving files
Mazen Touati ・ Apr 5 ・ 3 min read
Feel free to share your feedback
Hey!
We all know that tens of thousands of hospitals in the world have a massive shortage in the number of isolation wards/hospital beds. On the other hand, there might be some other hospitals, stadiums and other public places closed down due to COVID-19. In the midst of this pandemic, the public places which are willing to set up beds/offer spaces as additional isolation wards would be able to aid the patients' need.
Think of it as an Airbnb for Isolation wards.
This web app would be able to connect hospitals that are in need of isolation wards with the providers.
Suggestions are welcome :D
Hey, this is a legitimately good idea. This might actually work out as I frequently heard lots of hospitals don't have enough beds. If this problem exists in your area, they will probably use it from day one.
I wish I can give you useful suggestions, but wish you the best!