Stalk Arrested Development? Get Notified When It Premiers via Twilio SMS
Time to read: 1 minute
May 03, 2013
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And now the story of one developer evangelist who feared missing out on Arrested Development’s season four premiere, and the one company which provided him the tools to be notified when it’s live…It’s Twilio Development.
Jonathan Gottfried woke up one morning realizing it would be a huge mistake if he wasn’t the very first to see the premiere of Arrested Development Season 4 on Netflix. He knew it would be released on May 26th, 2013, but not exactly when. Midnight that day? And is that midnight, OC time? The 26th is a Sunday too. Would he have time to brunch at Skip Church’s and fill up on a Skip’s Scramble before the premiere?
Well Jon is an ideas man and luckily for the rest of the Arrested Development fans, he built BananAlerts to notify him when the new season was live on Netflix. At first we were not optimistic it could be done, but he didn’t take “not optimistic it could be done” for an answer.
After some quick hacking with the Twilio API, he was able to write a Ruby application using Sinatra and Datamapper on Heroku to let people subscribe to SMS alerts. He then wrote a scraper using Nokogiri to detect when Season 4 goes live and notify all of the subscribers.
Jon accepts the fact that if you blog about an app, you’re going to get hop-ons. So go ahead, text ANN to 619-EGG-VEAL (619-344-8325) to opt in to BananAlerts.
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