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Inspiration
When we arrived to Georgia, we had an interesting problem. There were a lot of instances where we needed to know something and wanted to ask about it but the efforts were mostly futile since most people didn't understand us. Also, most of these questions could easily be answered if we had an access to the Internet, but since we were in another country and data roaming is crazy expensive, that was not an option. It'd be really great if we could find a way to get the info we need by sending text messages in the absence of the Internet.
So, we decided to create Hext to address exactly this situation: To help people get answers/tips/etc. from the Internet when they don't have access to it.
What it does
It allows you to send your question as a sms message to a given number and posts the question on our Twitter account as well as our web application. Any user on Twitter or on our web application can send a reply as a Twitter response or as an answer on the web app, and the response is sent as an sms to the asker.
How we built it
We built it using Ruby on Rails framework with Twilio integration for sending and receiving text messages. We use oauth for the twitter integration for login and responses. We use Heroku for speeding our deployment. We also experimented with Otto (successor to Vagrant) for speeding our devops and Amazon Web Services for deployment purposes.
Challenges we ran into
Understanding Twilio and how it works. Setting up AWS and Twitter social auth.
What I learned
Omniauth errors are elusive and the stack traces hard to comprehend.
What's next for Hext
Getting the twitter responses to tweets as answers to questions from within Twitter.
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