Attending Twilio’s Signal San Francisco
TL; DR An awesome event, especially if you’re a Twilio Customer, if you’re not, well … go there anyway!
As you may know, at Les Tontons, we’re pretty huge fans of conferences, and after attending Loic’s Leade.rs conference in Paris about a month ago, we’ve sent our own Clément Sauvage about 10,000 km from Paris, to San Francisco, California to attend TwilioHouse Signal Conference
7:00 AM Sunday, May 21st, waking up at 6:00 AM, going straight to Roissy-Charles-De-Gaulle Airport for my yearly “Air Dubdub flight” (more on this in about 10 days)
After snoring few hours (who said that! 😂) and after watching 2 films on an 0.2K screen, We finally landed in the 4th city of California (after LA, San Diego and San Jose) the city of startups!
Taking place in an awesome venue (Pier 27, with an awesome view over the SF Bay), the conference started with a SuperClass, sort of masterclass with Twilio’s own engineers and VP of products, great place to learn the best techniques to improve our workflow and algorithm; you may have heard of it, but indeed, at Les Tontons Livreurs we rely on Twilio’s super network & platform to guarantee the best experience to our beloved customers and Tontons (men with vans).
Most of talks were great, but I must be honest, if I learnt a lot about voice, the notify speaker didn’t master her topic, or not the finer details, she wasn’t able to answer my 2 questions (which were solved the day after ☺️. Thanks Victor 😘).
I wasn’t able to go there in the afternoon, because I was invited to Twilio’s Digital & Innovation Executive round table where with other C.X.Os from all around the world, we discussed the future of communication and how to get here.
After taking some glasses of Sparkling wine on top of the hotel Vitale (with a gorgeous view), it was time to get some rest. The “real” conference started the next day!
See you tomorrow !
Conference day 1
5:30 AM!
Time to wake up! Doing my Miracle morning routine!
And hit the road (well, shall I say call a Lyft) at 9 to go to the Pier.
After a huge coffee (after all, programmers turn coffee to code doesn’t they ?), we converge to the main hall to attend Jeff Lawson keynote (or, as I’d like to name him — The CEO who codes — remembering Signal London Jeff?).
In less than 20 sec, he puts all of the attendees in the mood, with a Huge Red API flag (OK. I want the same for our office).
And after showcase us all new Twilio’s product, he did it again, he codes live on stage! And damn! It was ES 6 Javascript 😍 ( Jeff, here is your mission for Signal London: Do that in server side Swift! I’ll be there, I promise!).
And no I won’t list all the new features announced, first of all because there is too much to write a decent description without scamping their awesome work, and secondly because a recap is available here.
Just a word about few products we use intensively every single day:
- Notify: Improved with dozen new channels
- Functions: Building serverless cloud communication infrastructure
- And the one i love the most, speech recognition and understand: the way to build text, voice and more bot with a couple of lines of code!
I spent most of my 1st conference day networking with people there. I even met the 2 guys behind Talkus, I’ve already met at Take Off Conf in Lille (🌍 is small isn’t it?).
The talk I liked the most that Wednesday was “Airbnb: Scaling communications”, one downside though, the Vaughan room was really, really too small, and there was no overflow room 😔.
But I need to mention that I was a great fan of those headsets, which deliver the right talk without disturbing the others.
That evening I was invited to a really cool party which took place in a Tennis Table club 🏓, cool place, good appetizers, definitely a neat idea! thanks for the invite.
Day 2 (Thursday)
My 2nd day was much busier (except for the $BASH 😅)
It started with another Keynote, with the Hall of Doers (printed on 20 fax machines #SoTrendy). Once more I need to be honest, IMHO this keynote was much toooo long. One hour would have been enough ! But… I must admit that the conversation between Jeff and Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce was really interessant.
On that day I spent most of my time in 4 really cool talks
- Twilio Functions (by the great & unique Carter Rabasa #Gif-o-rama)
- Twilio Proxy by David Ganly
- A Blueprint for Delighting your Customers at Scale
- Solving Sudoku in Swift
The $BASH
OK, everyone who knows me well, know that I’m a geek (not a no-life, I said geek 😉). And I love partying, but, please believe me, I found at Signal the most impressive geek party I’ve ever seen in my life! The $BASH
Do you remember those games where you need to push buttons to go further? It was in my childhood, games like Crash Bandicoot (1996–1999), I was 6–9, so about 20 years ago.
Well, take this concept, add few NFC tags, mysterious codes, good music (She’s up all night for good fun, I’m up all night to get lucky 👨🏻🎤🎸🎹), light effects, few glasses of alcohol, and you get the $BASH. One of the most exciting parties I’ve ever made (OK, and there was an Apple ][ (👨🏻💻😲) !
Thanks Twilions! See you in London! Definitely!
Huge thanks to Kristina for her proofreading.
And for people who don’t know who we are: Les Tontons Livreurs provides an on-demand Man with a Van service with tailored price, bespoke for your needs! Come and find us at LesTontonsLivreurs.com or on your iOS Device and get 10 € using the voucher WELOVESIGNAL
