Have you ever forgotten a friend’s birthday? It happens to the best of us. After the frustration of checking Facebook every day for birthdays, I wanted a better push notification system with better filters.

I wrote an article, Building a Simple Birthday App with Flask-SQLAlchemy, showing a way to export your Facebook birthday calendar to an .ics file and import it into a DB with Flask and Flask-SQLAlchemy.

After talking to Twilio at PyCon we thought it would be cool to extend this app by adding SMS notifications and a possibility to send birthday messages via SMS, so I signed up for a Twilio account and got coding.

In this post we will build a simple birthday app with Python, Flask and Twilio’s Programmable SMS service API so you never miss a birthday again:



The complete code for this project on Github.

Setup instructions

Start by cloning the Git repository: