There are plenty of reasons to keep an eye on Twilio‘s initial public offering, like whether or not it will open the door for more tech IPOs. Here’s a small-but-fun one: The company has organized a live coding event from the New York Stock Exchange.
Tomorrow morning, Twilio will bring three developers to the NYSE floor, where they’ll be trying to build as many apps as they can using the company’s voice and text messaging platform.
Three people doesn’t quite add up to a full hackathon (the company’s calling it a “code jam”), but hey, it sounds a lot more interesting than just ringing the bell. Plus, it’s pretty on-brand for a developer platform like Twilio — in fact, developer evangelist Rob Spectre told me via email that “cutting code is the way we celebrate everything at Twilio.”
“Every time we have a new office, a new product or any other milestone along the way, we invite developers from our community over to make a bunch of new stuff,” he said. “It’s what we do. We had to do the same thing on Wall Street.”
Spectre will be one of the coders participating, along with Dropbox developer advocate Leah Culver and fintech developer David Huerta.
You’ll be able to watch the event, which starts with the opening bell at 9:30am, live on Twitch. When will it end? Spectre said, “Whenever they kick us out.”