FindaPark Wins Our Earth Day Contest & Vimal Wins Our Teach Twilio Contest

May 11, 2011
Written by
Rahim Sonawalla
Contributor
Opinions expressed by Twilio contributors are their own

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This week: double the action, double the excitement, double the winner announcements! We had a lot of submissions for these contests and it took us a while to go through them, but we’re happy to announce the winners of our Earth Day contest and our Teach Twilio contest are Brooke Dukes and Vimal.

Brooke Dukes Wins Our Earth Day Contest

For our Earth Day developer contest, Brooke created a simple system that let’s outdoor enthusiats find nearby parks. Simply call (206) 673-5344 and enter your zip code to find the parks nearest to you. (Finda Park is currently limited to parks in Seattle, so try 98122.) Here’s what Brooke had to say about Finda Park:

“Finda Park was started as a fun app just to allow people to find parks in their zip code. The original Idea was to use the Google Map API to search for parks by zip code. Unfortunately Google Maps currently does not support places/location searching that is as vague as “Park 55555.” So Finda Park uses the Bing Maps API to find the longitude and longitude of a zip code then searches the data.seattle.gov parks data for matches within a half mile of that range.

“Future plans would be to include nationwide zip code based search. Right now the app only supports Seattle zip codes. The park data is using the open data from data.seattle.gov. The hardest part is finding park data as their doesn’t seem to be a good database of our nations parks.”

You can get the source code for Finda Park by e-mailing Brooke at getinfo@knowconceptdw.com

Vimal Wins Our Teach Twilio Contest

For our Teach Twilio contest, Vimal tapped his inner-teacher and created a comic tutorial on how to write an SMSRoulette Twilio app using Python. The comic walks you through signing up for a Twilio account, writing the Flask app, storing the data in Redis, and handling SMS keywords. Source code is on his github page, and the full tutorial is embedded below.
SMSRoulette Tutorial (Twilio, Python, Redis)