Today the Twilio family celebrates Alexander Graham Bell (AGB) day. A day to relax and enjoy the history of the telephone’s invention. Before you ask, I’m not entirely sure why we celebrate AGB day on April 3rd which is neither the date of the first phone call or when the patent for the telephone was […]

“What exactly do you do?” Since I started working as a Developer Evangelist at Twilio I get asked this question multiple times a week. Whether it’s while I’m at a meetup, speaking at a conference or even when I’m visiting my family for the holidays. Often times when someone asks me this question it’s because […]

Last week at php[tek] I was inspired by Elizabeth Smith to experiment with Facebook’s new programming language Hack. But first, I needed an environment that I could work in. I had to jump through a few different tutorials to do it and I thought it may save others time if I compiled what I did in one place. In this post I’ll show you how to get a DigitalOcean server going with nginx and HHVM so we can write some Hack code. Don’t worry, it only takes about 20 minutes.

I-40W headed towards Little Rock is covered in ice and the bus has traveled 30 miles in 6 hours. I’m beginning to fear that I may have to tell the 20 entrepreneurs riding along that we’re going to pull over and sleep on the bus. That’s when it happens. Someone asks our bus driver Eddie to crank the radio and starts singing karaoke. It’s not long before the entire bus has joined in and we forget about the extreme circumstances we’re in. For me, this moment embodies what it was like to conduct the 2014 Midwest StartupBus. I was surrounded by incredible people who were constantly amazing me and I wanted to share a few things they taught me.

4 years ago, I attended my first hackathon. I’ve been addicted ever since. For the uninitiated, hackathons are events where technology people get together and intensively collaborate on projects over a specific period of time (typically around 24-48 hours). During internal hackathons, a company blocks off a certain period of time to host a hackathon only for their employees. To some more traditional technology companies this may sound a bit scary – “what about the lost productivity?!? And deadlines, we have deadlines!”. Hosting an internal hackathon does take some sacrifice, but I wanted to share some reasons why your company should embrace the idea.