Company
Date Published
Author
Danielle Morrill
Word count
442
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

Jon Sackett attended PyCon with his department and faced challenges in getting messages out to the entire group. He used Twilio SMS to solve this problem and created MassText, a group text messaging system that uses a single Twilio phone number to forward messages to all users on the team. The application works by sending an SMS to a Twilio number, which then forwards the message to all users in the list through a Twilio XML response. Jon successfully deployed MassText for PyCon and reported high response rates, with most people receiving messages within seconds of someone sending a message out. He also made modifications to the application to prevent spammers from sending unwanted messages.