I have a new role and I’m very excited about it. I am now a Developer Educator for Twilio. Twilio takes care of the messy telecom hardware and exposes a globally available cloud API that developers can interact with to build intelligent and complex communications systems. To get this role, one of the things I had to do was give a live demo of something (anything really). To illustrate how easy it was to work with the Twilio API, I utilized the SMS API to enable two-factor authentication in an ASP.NET MVC web app. The process of walking a bunch of developers (used to writing Python and JavaScript code on their MacBooks) through using Visual Studio was a lot of fun and I must have impressed because I got the job!

On my first day, I got introduced to a novel new approach to technical and API documentation. Today, they are being officially announced. They’re called Tutorials which sounds simple enough, but instead of putting the narrative first, they put the code first because, let’s face it, that’s what us developers are the most interested in seeing anyway. Rather than try to describe it to you, I encourage you to go check it out. Here’s a great tutorial on how to automate an SMS-based workflow using C# and ASP.NET MVC. And here’s another one on how to use masked phone numbers (just like they do at Airbnb).

I am excited to be joining the team that puts these excellent tutorials together. I’m currently working on a company directory that you can query using SMS and get back a photo, full name, email, and phone number of an employee in your company. I created a directory for the fictitious company Marvel Universe, which you can give a spin by sending a text message to: +1-209-337-3517. (Hint, make your text message the name of your favorite Marvel comic hero.) When you do, you’ll get back the contact info as an MMS response.

That’s just a preview. I’ll write another blog post once that tutorial has been published. And, you know I’m going to find a way to use MassTransit with the Twilio API’s, so stay tuned…