Saving Your Messages From The Void: TwiliQ Backs Up Your SMS

Saving Your Messages From The Void: TwiliQ Backs Up Your SMS

Falling Asleep Counting Dependencies

“The key thing, especially talking to so many startup CTOs, comes down to ‘How many things can I not have to worry about so I can sleep at night?’” says Chris.

If your development nightmare becomes reality and your Twilio endpoint goes down, Twiliq is there to save the day. TwiliQ grabs your messages before they disappear into the ether, stores them, and replays Twilio’s HTTP request until your app returns a response in the 200s.

“To have someone else manage it for you means you can sleep that much better,” Chris says, like a CTO who spends the waning moments before he falls asleep worrying about redundancy.

Wrangling A Collective Idea Into a Production Ready App

He knew he wasn’t the first person to have the idea of a worst-case-scenario message queue back up system. But others’ solutions were out in the badlands of forgotten Heroku apps. Nothing was readily available, let alone production ready.

Chris built Twiliq in the tiny pockets of free time he has while he’s at work serving as the CTO of Crisis Text Line. To make the most of his time, he relied on Node’s flexibility, and the Node community at large.

“The flexibility to get something out there really quick is incredible,” says Chris. “Node and the NPM ecosystem have robust libraries. It’s flexible and seems to be the direction programming is going — writing frontend and backend in the same language.”

Autoscaling In The Worst Moments With Google Cloud Platform + App Engine

Twiliq’s existence is predicated on worst-case-scenario moments. So, Chris naturally chose a cloud platform that would auto-scale at a moment’s notice in the event worse comes to worst. Twiliq is powered by Google Cloud Platform’s Pub/Sub and App Engine., the architecture of which Chris greatly admires. He recites the Google Cloud Platform deploy command from memory.
 
“Gcloud app deploy and boom! You have two servers ready to autoscale. It can handle volume spikes without you having to think about it, which I think is also one of the great things about Node, and other tools that are out there. There’s a lot of tools that make the startup cost of getting an idea out the door a lot smaller, but a lot more robust.”
 
Google Cloud Platform, Twiliq, Node apps — they’re all infrastructure layers. While many businesses are powered by Twilio, Chris sees an opportunity for infrastructure tools serving those Twilio powered businesses.  Chris is one of the first few developers to publish a production ready tool that sits in the middle between an Twilio powered business and Twilio itself.
 
He hopes that Twiliq not only saves CTOs and developers of all sorts headaches (and sleepless nights), but that it empowers them to build new tools.
 
“Looking at the direction we’re taking, I think there are going to be more support systems built on Twilio,” says Chris. “Lowering the barrier to entry into the messaging space is fundamental to the direction our culture is going.”