Interview with Greg Baugues at GOTO Chicago 2015

Hi, it’s Mike with UGtastic. I’m standing here with Greg Boggess, who gave a talk about how he taught his dog to send him selfies, which just kind of blows my mind entirely . Well, thanks for taking the time to speak with me, but teaching your dog to send you selfies, that sounds like a cartoon. I don’t know. Yeah, it was a lot of fun. So we have this floor lamp that has a switch that you step on. And a couple weeks after we got our dog, I was laying in bed, and I was like, I should teach her to turn that on and off so I don’t have to get up and out of bed every day. So she’s a super smart dog, we came to find out, and using treats and a lot of repetition, we got her so she could run up and press the button and turn the light on and off. And it’s like, well, hey, I’ve got this dog that can press a button. Now, girl, this is my oyster. Yeah, exactly. What do you do with that? And this seems really useful. And last year, so I work for Twilio. I serve as a developer evangelist for them. And we make it really easy for developers to send and receive text messages and place and receive phone calls and just a few lines of code. And last year, we launched MMS, picture messages. And so I had never done hardware hacking before, but I started tinkering with the Arduino Yun, which is an Arduino that has Wi-Fi and Linux built in. Oh, okay. And figured out, really, just using some rudimentary Python , the Dropbox API and Twilio API. And basically hooked a button up to the… This Arduino. My dog runs up, presses the button, and takes a picture with a USB webcam. Yeah. Uploads it to Dropbox to get a publicly accessible URL, and then sends me, my phone, an MMS with that picture. Yeah. When it starts to have little pieces of paper with writing on it, that’s, I think, when you’re going to have trouble. But that’s so pretty. I mean, have you gotten any real fun ones with it, like l icking the camera or anything like that? You know, it’s one of those things where… So there are, surprisingly… Some limitations to the dog sending selfies. Oh, okay. So the camera doesn’t take the picture immediately. Oh, okay. So you’ve got to get the dog to press the button and then pause for a second, which is really hard when there’s a treat and pause. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, yeah, we’ll progress along the way. We’ll progress. I was, you know, if I keep working on it, the next step would be to hook up a treat dispenser that, like, doesn’t dispense for a couple seconds. So she’s got to figure out how to, like, press the button. But we’ll see, you know. Yeah, now you need to teach your dog patience. Yeah, yeah. Good luck with that. Yeah, yeah. But, yeah, no, I wrote a blog post about it. It’s bit.ly slash doggy selfie, doggy dash selfies. Okay. IE, D-O-G-G-I-E? D-O-G-G-Y. Oh, doggy. Okay. Dash selfies. Yeah, there’s so many ways to spawn it. Yeah, and apparently dog selfies, bit.ly slash dog selfies was taken. Really? That’s surprising, right? Yeah, yeah. But, yeah, so I documented the whole process from, like, taking the U-N out of the box to creating a photo booth with the Arduino U-N to… Then using the Dropbox and Twilio API and wrote the whole thing up there. And it was a super fun intro to hardware hacking post. Yeah, and, you know, that kind of dovetails into another topic. I talked with Patricia G. about this. She’s a developer advocate for JetBrains, and you’re a developer evangelist for Twilio. And you’ve written some articles about what’s the role of a developer evangelist is. But as she described, it kind of really depends on where you’re at. So I was hoping to hear about, from your perspective, more information. About what a developer evangelist is with Twilio, and what your experience has been. Sure. Well, Twilio is an API company. So our product is an API from day one. And so the developer evangelist role at Twilio is to serve the developer community. Because we, even though, like, developers are our primary customers, if you try to just go out and hard sell a developer, or you try to use, you know, marketing gimmicks or whatever … Right. They’re super smart, you know, and they’re super savvy, and they’ll catch on to that, and you’ll just turn them on. Well, also wary, if it looks too marketing-y, and that’s a salesperson, you know… Just want nothing to do with it. Yeah. You know, have the exact opposite effect. So what Twilio has done since the beginning is to hire developers to serve the community. And our job is to, the mission of our evangelism organization is to inspire and equip developers to change communications forever. And so… And so… We inspire and equip in different ways. Sometimes it’s speaking at conferences. So this dog selfie thing, this guy came up after the talk and said, that was really inspiring. I’m like, that is, that’s the goal. Yeah. You know, like, that’s the goal, is to get him to go do something that he didn’t know he could do before. Yeah, get jazzed off of the whole idea. Yeah, and if he leaves off, like, the actual text part and just builds a photo booth, like, that’s fine. He’s going to remember that Twilio was there. Right. You know, and if the need ever comes up in the future to send text messages… Or to place phone calls from within his app, then he’ll remember Twilio. Right. You know, and so that’s our mission as an organization, is just to be present, to serve the community. Sometimes that involves telling them about Twilio. Often it doesn’t. Yeah. And it’s worked. Like, Twilio, you know, it’s been an incredible honor for the last… I’ve just been there 15 months, but Twilio now has 500,000 developers using their platform. And, you know, they’re about six or seven years old now. Yeah, so sometimes just leaving a good… flavor in somebody’s mind, you know, even if they ended up not buying your product right now, they’re going to remember, I had a good experience, and it was right next to that brand. That’s right. And, you know, but what matters is that you have people that are just happy when they’re near the product, so they’ll have good thoughts about it. So when they do come time to buy, they’re going to, you know, go to you first. And, you know, like, I’ve seen there’s a lot of different … Yeah. Yeah. You mentioned the MMS stuff and the phone number lookup. That alone, it was a pretty cool new service offering. What are some of the other things that Twilio is working on or publishing that would be interesting for developers who are working in the more social, more connected applications? The thing we’re most excited about is we just announced video, the Twilio video. Okay. So our hope is to make it as easy… As easy to integrate video into your apps. So it’s like WebRTC? Exactly. Okay. We’re using WebRTC. So if you ever played with WebRTC in the past, you’ll know that it’s very… It’s not very friendly. Right. And it’s… The technology is there, but it is not a full-on solution. You still have to build a lot of your own solution, and you have to deal with the connectivity issues, and you have to deal with cross-browsers, and iOS and Safari, they don’t play nice with WebRTC. So you have to deal with that solution if you want your iOS app to talk to an Android app or to talk to a web browser. And so we have built APIs around all of this, and we’re releasing SDKs next week at our conference signal. Oh, okay. So that’s the Twilio conference. Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, we’re putting on a conference next week, and the attendees are going to be the first ones that have access to the private beta, and then we’ll open it up to the public after we get some feedback on that. Yeah, that sounds really interesting, because as somebody who’s looked at how to deliver video over the internet… Yeah, right. But not necessarily… I resisted YouTube for a while for my own detriment, but, you know, live and learn. But I’ve been looking at WebRTC and wondering, like, how I could use it. So I’m actually going to talk after this interview. But thank you very much for taking the time to speak with me. No problem. I appreciate it. Yeah, it’s my pleasure. Thank you very much.