Twilio Engineering with Pat Malatack

Back in 2008, the range of tools that engineers could use to connect computer systems together were getting quite good. Cloud computing was democratizing access to servers. But the telephony ecosystem was still inaccessible to the average developer. If you needed your program to make a phone call and connect a user to a customer service representative, there was no easy way to do that.

Twilio was started to make it easy for developers to connect to telephone systems using simple API calls. This has unlocked many important use cases: from Uber’s communication systems to the widespread adoption of 2-factor authentication.

In this episode, Twilio VP of product management Pat Malatack joins the show to explain how the company builds and scales the telephony systems that underpin applications which we use every day. We also talked about how Twilio’s culture shapes how engineering proceeds at the company.

Full disclosure: Twilio is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily.