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RobSpectre

758 karma · joined March 30, 2010

Just your average self-produced superhero.
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RobSpectre··on The strange, sketchy emails a browser extension developer receives
I get four of these per month.
RobSpectre··on Scrollycoding – A new way to write code walkthroughs [video]
This is super tasteful and clean. Well done.
RobSpectre··on Tekserve auctions their vintage Mac collection
This is just heartbreaking.
RobSpectre··on Twilio announces $130M series E round
Very sorry to hear about your experience. Do you reckon you could reach out to rob [at] twilio?

Keen to hear more about the deliverability issues you are experiencing.

RobSpectre··on Twilio announces $130M series E round
Rob from Twilio here - the firms listed in the first two paragraphs are the new folks who are joining in this round, not the exclusive list of all participants.

BVP did participate in this round - great team to work with.

[edit] typo.

RobSpectre··on Twilio Video – Real-time WebRTC video infrastructure
Absolutely - we have a lot of ambition around where we want to take Twilio Video in the future.

This is only the first step.

RobSpectre··on Twilio Video – Real-time WebRTC video infrastructure
Check. Good feedback.
RobSpectre··on Twilio Video – Real-time WebRTC video infrastructure
Good question - one of Twilio Video's aim is to take a lot of the signaling headache away. We do expose the PeerConnection, but not the SDP object.

What would you want to use it for?

RobSpectre··on Twilio Video – Real-time WebRTC video infrastructure
Rob from Twilio here - appreciate the feedback.

Have you had an opportunity to check out TaskRouter yet? We released it a few weeks ago - definitely my favorite recent product that works with Twilio Voice:

https://www.twilio.com/taskrouter

RobSpectre··on Twilio Video – Real-time WebRTC video infrastructure
Rob from Twilio here - confirming this is an accurate description. Each peer in the conversation has a connection to every other peer.
RobSpectre··on Lookup by Twilio
Awesome - thanks for giving it a swing.
RobSpectre··on Lookup by Twilio
Mmmm - great feedback. We do provide this service for our phone numbers to do a CNAM lookup on inbound communications - can see how it would be useful for Twilio Lookup as well.
RobSpectre··on Lookup by Twilio
Yes. Yes we will. :'(
RobSpectre··on Lookup by Twilio
It would be based on the number itself. Obviously with local number portability this is not super accurate, but we do have some customers that find the data useful nevertheless.
RobSpectre··on Lookup by Twilio
Can't commit to anything yet - do appreciate the feedback though.
RobSpectre··on Lookup by Twilio
Much obliged on the bug reports. We've corrected the number on the demo page and confirmed it is working now.

If you both would like to shoot me an email to rob [at] twilio [dot] com, we'll ship you a t-shirt as thanks for pointing out the error.

RobSpectre··on Lookup by Twilio
Rob from Twilio here - thanks for using the service. Localization and fraud/spam protection are definitely the two most useful for Twilio Lookup, but suspect there are a couple more than might be less obvious.

1) Smarter Routing - quite a few developers have expressed they'd like to know whether or not a phone number is a landline or not before attempting to send a text message. Twilio Lookup will describe whether the number is mobile, landline, or voip so you can choose the appropriate communication to reach the number.

2) Error Checking - While libraries like libphonenumber are useful for determining if a number can possibly exist, there are some conditions where determining if a number does exist is more valuable. This can be used for error checking - if I as a user input a typo in my phone number (e.g. I mistype my personal phone number as '(347) 193-6073' which does not exist instead of '(347) 923-6073')

I also suspect across larger applications carrier info might also contain useful demography. For example, knowing that your users in Montana mostly use Verizon might inform your advertising to surface more CDMA devices in that market.

Ultimately this will probably end up like every other product we release - the killer use case is one we never even considered.

RobSpectre··on Lookup by Twilio
libphonenumber is definitely the jam for offline formatting - we use it all the time.
RobSpectre··on Lookup by Twilio
Hey Jon - Rob from Twilio here.

Good feedback - appreciate you sharing. We do have geographic information with each webhook sharing city, state and zip - agree it would be useful to have this in the Lookup resources as well.

RobSpectre··on Twilio Positions Itself for an IPO After Logging $100M in 2014 Revenue
Thanks Adam - we're rooting for you as you head out. Building a business serving developers is indeed as difficult as you say, but also - to be fair - an endless amount of fun.

Certainly nothing we'd rather be doing.

RobSpectre··on Twilio Positions Itself for an IPO After Logging $100M in 2014 Revenue
Very kind of you to say Tim. They put in an enormous amount of work to be prepared to serve you in the field. Lot more preparation ahead, but stoked you found it helpful.
RobSpectre··on Twilio Positions Itself for an IPO After Logging $100M in 2014 Revenue
Much obliged urs2102.

Whole lot more work between here and there - glad you could be a part of it with us.

RobSpectre··on Twilio Positions Itself for an IPO After Logging $100M in 2014 Revenue
Rob from Twilio here - thanks a lot of saying that akavi.

Took a lot of work to get here - stoked to hear you are finding it well.

RobSpectre··on Introducing TaskRouter
Great feedback jallmann - thanks.
RobSpectre··on Introducing TaskRouter
A fair concern. I think Task Router is less going up the food chain and more going up the stack - we're trying to provide more abstraction for the state common to all these problems as a pure platform.

My hope is all our customers can leverage these primitives to invest more development time in their applications rather than solve the same mundane problems over and over again. I think that's the promise of a continually improving platform rather than an elbow move.

[edit: typo]

RobSpectre··on Introducing TaskRouter
I think more specifically the core state that drives an ACD abstracted into primitives any developer can manipulate.

Does that make sense?

RobSpectre··on Introducing TaskRouter
Rob from Twilio here. Very fair question - a lot of these concepts are foreign for folks that haven't worked in the call center space before.

I think Al Cook on our product marketing team described it most aptly as referring to Task Router as "ripping the still-beating heart out of a high volume call center and sitting it on a table for a developer to plug in his/her app."

Task Router is a set of primitives that takes the state that must be managed to accept work from multiple channels and delivering it to resources that can complete them. You can define the core logic to accept tasks from any channel, assign it to the appropriate workflow based on its attributes, and connect it to a resource ready and able to complete it. These flows are defined by you, all without re-implementing the state management common to this problem domain.

Does that help?

RobSpectre··on Building Twilio Apps on Rails: Security, MMS and Delivery Receipts
Totally fair solution. Some folks like to roll their own, some folks like to use ours. Important bit is the app is validating the data is sending and receiving.

Param ordering changes in your framework can definitely hit. I've caught similar bugs when upgrading frameworks before hitting production with some validation unit tests. Here is an example if that is helpful: https://github.com/RobSpectre/Twilio-Hackpack-for-Heroku-and...

RobSpectre··on Twilio Adds Low-Cost, Two-Way MMS Picture Messaging to Its API Cloud
Definitely agree - MMS is a deceptively complex product to deliver.
RobSpectre··on Twilio Adds Low-Cost, Two-Way MMS Picture Messaging to Its API Cloud
Kind of you to say - we work pretty hard on it. If you want a quick intro to the interface, we've but up examples in six languages for you to take a look at:

https://www.twilio.com/blog/2014/09/getting-started-with-twi...

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