The Making of Trellio Blacklist
Block Unwanted Calls from Any Phone Number
As a small company, Philosophie does not have an intercom phone system or a receptionist handling incoming phone calls. Near the end of last year, Nick Giancola, one of our developers, created Trellio, an app that records and transcribes voicemails into cards on a Trello board. The name came from Trello and Twilio since we use Twilio to forward incoming calls to the office line.
The idea for a blacklist came from the bombardment of calls from telemarketers, recruiters, and overseas solicitors looking to provide outsourced work. Calls can become very disruptive in our office since we have an open work space. And with no receptionist to filter calls, it is costly to have a designer or a developer rejecting sales offers. The three minutes per call adds up to considerable time that can be used more effectively, such as learning a new language or putting post-it notes all over your desk-mate’s chair.
In my own experience, I tend to check caller ID before I pick up any call. If I miss a call, I perform a reverse lookup (i.e. checkwhocalled.com, whocallsme.com, etc) and see if anyone has been bothered by this number before. Chances are, There are some nice apps on Android, such as Mr. Number and Postman that integrate blacklist into your smartphone. I thought it would be amazing if I could bring a similar experience to Trellio.
Usually there is some free time between projects at Philosophie. We call it being “on the beach.” When I was on the beach in August, I completed the Twilio API lesson on Codecademy. Then I was given the task to update Trellio using my freshly acquired knowledge.
The Trellio app is definitely a step outside of my comfort zone. First of all, I have never worked with Sinatra and MongoDB, so I had to familiarize myself with the framework first. Secondly, as a visual person, it was very unsettling to work on a project purely in the codebase. The Matrix? Totally.
I forked the Trellio codebase and signed up for a trial Twilio account. With my phone as the staging destination, the first goal was to check if Trellio was able to distinguish incoming phone numbers. I added an if-then condition when an incoming call happens. The second goal was to create a database of phone numbers that will be sent to voicemail automatically, so calls from these numbers would never be forwarded to the office phone. After hours of struggle, a blacklist model is created and I was able to edit the database via terminal. The last goal was for non-developer users to add and delete phone numbers easily without accessing the terminal. This is probably my favorite step: adding an interface to the application. Blacklist has restricted access so the database can only be modified by limited users. Once logged in, the user can add a caller name to the phone number as a reminder.
And voila! Any incoming call from the blacklist will go straight to voicemail.
Enjoy your peace and tranquility!
If you want to implement something similar, check out the Trellio open source code on GitHub!
