Creative Engineering Demos And Twilio: Mike Hall Interviews Greg Baugues | GOTO Conference 2015
Creative Engineering Demos And Twilio: Mike Hall Interviews Greg Baugues | GOTO Conference 2015
Meet Greg Baugues, a developer evangelist for Twilio, who taught his dog to send selfies using an Arduino, Dropbox, and Twilio API. This project demonstrates the intersection of technology and creativity, as well as the importance of patience and persistence in engineering. #hardwarehacking #dogselfies #twilio #developercommunity #engineering
The Interviewer
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
The Guest
Greg Baugues
creative engineering demos and Twilio
The Conversation
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
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 then it's like, "Well, hey, I've got this dog that can press a button. " Oh, now world is my oyster. Yeah, exactly. What do you do with that?
Greg Baugues
creative engineering demos and Twilio
And this seems really useful. And last year... So I work for Twilio. Mm-hmm . We're evangelists 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, and figured out really just using some rudimentary Python, the Dropbox API, and Twilio API, and basically hooked a button up to this Arduino. My dog runs up, presses the button, and takes a picture with a USB webcam, uploads it to Dropbox to get a publicly accessible URL, and then sends me, my phone, an MMS with that picture.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Yeah.
Greg Baugues
creative engineering demos and Twilio
When it starts to have little pieces of paper with writing on it, that's, I think, when you're gonna have trouble.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Yeah.
Greg Baugues
creative engineering demos and Twilio
But that's so pretty.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
I mean, have you gotten any real fun ones with it licking the camera or anything like that?
Greg Baugues
creative engineering demos and Twilio
You know, it's one of those things where... So there are, surprisingly, some limitations.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Yeah. Yeah.
Greg Baugues
creative engineering demos and Twilio
There are limitations to the dog sending selfies. Oh, okay. So the camera doesn't take the picture immediately. Oh, okay. So you gotta get the dog to press the button and then pause for a second, which is really hard when there's a treat and pause.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Greg Baugues
creative engineering demos and Twilio
And so we'll progress along... It's gone.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Yeah. Yeah.
Greg Baugues
creative engineering demos and Twilio
Along the way, we'll progress. If I keep working on it, the next step would be to hook up a treat dispenser that doesn't dispense for a couple seconds, so she's gotta figure out how to press the button, but we'll see.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Yeah.
Greg Baugues
creative engineering demos and Twilio
Now you need to teach your dog patience.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Greg Baugues
creative engineering demos and Twilio
But yeah, no, I wrote a blog post about it. It's a bit. ly/doggy-selfies.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Okay.
Greg Baugues
creative engineering demos and Twilio
I documented...
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
I-E-D-O-G-G-I-E?
Greg Baugues
creative engineering demos and Twilio
D-O-G-G-Y. Oh, doggy.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Okay.
Greg Baugues
creative engineering demos and Twilio
Dash selfies. Yeah, there's so many ways to spawn it.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Yeah.
Greg Baugues
creative engineering demos and Twilio
And apparently dog selfies, bit. ly/dogselfies was taken.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Really?
Greg Baugues
creative engineering demos and Twilio
That's...
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Yeah. Surprising, right? Yeah. Yeah.
Greg Baugues
creative engineering demos and Twilio
But yeah, so I documented the whole process from taking the Ute out of the box to creating a photo booth with the Arduino Ute to... Then using the Dropbox and Twilio API and wrote the whole thing up there, and a super fun intro to hardware hacking post.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Yeah. Yeah.
Greg Baugues
creative engineering demos and Twilio
And that kind of dovetails into another topic. I talked with Trisha Gee 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...
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Yeah.
Greg Baugues
creative engineering demos and Twilio
... more information about what a developer evangelist is with Twilio and what your experience has been.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Sure.
Greg Baugues
creative engineering demos and Twilio
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 developers are our primary customers, if you try to just go out and hard sell a developer, or you try to use...
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Yeah.
Greg Baugues
creative engineering demos and Twilio
... the marketing gimmicks or whatever...
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Right.
Greg Baugues
creative engineering demos and Twilio
... they're super smart, 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... Want nothing to do with it.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Yeah.
Greg Baugues
creative engineering demos and Twilio
Have the exact opposite effect. So what Twilio's 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 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's the goal. " Yeah, yeah. That's the goal, is to get him to go do something that he didn't know he could do before. Yeah, get jazzed up a lot.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Yeah.
Greg Baugues
creative engineering demos and Twilio
The whole idea. Yeah, and if he leaves off the actual text part and just builds a photo booth, that's fine. He's going to remember that Twilio was there.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Right.
Greg Baugues
creative engineering demos and Twilio
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.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Right.
Greg Baugues
creative engineering demos and Twilio
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.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Yeah.
Greg Baugues
creative engineering demos and Twilio
And it's worked. Twilio, 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 they're about six or seven years old now. Yeah, so sometimes just leaving a good flavor in somebody's mind, even if they ended up not buying your product right now, we're going to remember, I had a good experience and it was right next to that brand, 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 go to you first. And I've seen there's a lot of different, like 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 the Twilio video, so our hope is to make it as easy to integrate video into your apps.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
So it's like WebRTC? Exactly.
Greg Baugues
creative engineering demos and Twilio
We're using WebRTC. So if you ever played with WebRTC in the past, you'll know that it's not very friendly. 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 so forth. 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.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
So that's the Twilio conference?
Greg Baugues
creative engineering demos and Twilio
Yeah, that's right.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Okay.
Greg Baugues
creative engineering demos and Twilio
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 live and learn. But I've been looking at WebRTC and wondering how I could use it. So I'm actually going to talk after this interview.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
But thank you very much for taking the time to speak with me. No problem. I appreciate it. Yeah, it's my pleasure. Subtitles by the Amara. org community