This year I attended the Twilio Signal Conference. Same as its first year, it was held in Pier 27, San Francisco. It was a 2-day action-packed conference with a keynote session in the morning and sessions after till 6 pm.
The developer experience provided by the conference is superb comparing to a lot of other developer conferences nowadays. Chartered buses with wifi were provided for commuters using different transits. Snacks served all day. 6 30-minutes sessions for you to choose from every time slot. No need to wait in line and you could always attend the sessions you want (sorry Google I/O). For developers, as least for me, the most important thing was a special coffee stall opened every morning to serve you with a fresh brewed coffee to wake you up and energize you for the rest of the day. With the CEO among others to code right in front of you in a keynote session to show you some demos, it is one true developer conference that you could hope for.
The whole conference lit up by the Internet of Blings with live code demonstration on stage.
There were a lot of new products and features Twilio announced in Signal and I would not spend to time to recap here. You may read more info here and here. The interesting thing to note is how Twilio gets so huge. It started off with a text messaging service, it now also provides services on video, authentication, phone, routing. It is the power engine under the hood for the fast growing companies like Lyft and Uber. It now offers the most complete messaging platform for developers to connect to their users. It now has capabilities to reroute your numbers and tap into the phone conversations. It partners with T-Mobile to get into the IoT domain. Twilio’s ambition and vision is not small at all. The big question is: how Twilio achieve all these? This question can be controversial, but for me, I would have to say it all boils down into simplicity: making things really easy, really good, and just works. The Twilio APIs are very easy to use and it does exactly what it says, no more, no less. Its reliability is superb. That is what developers want and rely on.
Jeff Lawson talks about Twilio’s infrastucture
Twilio as a messaging hub
But wait, there’s more. Check out my thoughts on the sessions at Signal and my $Bash night experience. I almost won a chance to play with the mysterious Magic Leap, and I might yet get access for finishing second. Stay tuned.