Twilio turns developer education into a game with TwilioQuest 3
/Educating developers about cloud communications isn’t an easy task, and that’s why Twilio turned to a video game to do the job. TwilioQuest 3 is launching today with a mission of training developers to create cloud communications solutions.
It may sound like “gamification” rearing its ugly head again. But Kevin Whinnery, lead developer of the game, said that description isn’t a good one because it doesn’t reflect the effort that has gone into creating the game-themed tutorial application with animations that are done in classic 16-bit arcade style. Developers go on quests to complete programming challenges in desktop training sessions that replace live training.
Whinnery has been at Twilio for 6.5 years. He spent a lot of that time as a developer evangelist, teaching developers how to use JavaScript so they could be more successful. But the game turned out to be a better way to engage people, and the new version is a ground-up rewrite of the game. Whinnery and his team spent about six months on the latest version, which has about 10 hours of content.