When you attend a conference in person, you try to jot down in your head everything you want to try later, or you write it down to remember it. But with virtual conferences, you have absolutely everything at your disposal: your philippines whatsapp number browser, your text editor, and your terminal. We wanted to make it possible for anyone attending SIGNAL to be able to build and explore Twilio products at the same time as we were demonstrating them. We already had a Twilio CLI that provided a plugin template that we were able to use to build our experience.
By building on top of the Twilio CLI, we were able to add some features like setting variables for account access in demo applications. What should it do? As the primary challenge was to support the people present to start coding, the major functionality we wanted to add was the possibility of accessing a catalog of simple and relevant applications, which can be automatically downloaded and configured. CLI screenshot From there, we wondered if there were any other ideas that might be useful for participants. Aside from the mandatory resources section with all the useful links, we wanted to add a little something special.
This goes back to our own experiences with virtual conferences. Providing you with collections of examples that you can browse is one thing. But providing demos and relevant links while you’re watching the presentation, via live embedded captions, is something else! We also thought about adding the schedule. It's useful to have it handy at all times to refer to, register for sessions or open your browser. What technology to use? Since we code on top of the Twilio CLI , our technical choice for this challenge seemed logical. Twilio CLI uses the Open CLI Framework (oclif) based on Node.