Quick Thinking with a Twilio Integration

I was presented with a simple ask:

Can you help me curate and help our Pull Requests for new people trying to update their member pages in our gatsby site?

Well I'm not going to say no. So I set about asking how I can help and what examples might be for things that needed that extra help.

So here is an example:

A member submits a PR. It's just a markdown file edit, due to our consideration for dev experience and simplicity. But! Markdown does have valid and invalid syntax.

At this point I may need to help out with pulling down that PR as a branch, making a few changes, pushing it backup, and then seeing our linters and checks work.

Great! But, how do I know when this happens??

• Github notifications, check
• I get github notifications in my gmail, nice
• But hell, I don't check my gmail very often at all!

What do?

Placeholder for a whole talk I did about getting the right info to the right people at the right time

Here's what the idea was. And it actually worked!

Step 1: Creat a gmail filter search syntax to find this type of message. For me, it was like this:

in:inbox subject:([livecoders/website]) -in:chats

Nice! So, connect my gmail in a zap. Set up the Customize Email Matching Search

Next step! Well, I deem this personally very high priority so I reach for my good friend Twilio!

Placeholder for Twilio is a communications platform...

Now my next zap step is to send me an SMS message from one of my registered Twilio phone numbers to my cell phone number.

I configure the account SID, the token the from number, and the to number. Give it a message like:

New Live Coder Website PR Opened

Done. Save it, turn on the zap.

And I had a friend on the team open a PR as a test, this was the one and it worked!

I had a text on my phone! Then I could jump into gmail, octobox, or right in github notifications and handle it straight away.