Blog - Greg Holmes

22 articles available

Blog &Tutorials

Deep dives into development, technology insights, and practical tutorials to help you grow as a developer.

Oct 29, 2025

Build a Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server for Symfony

Learn how to integrate the Model Context Protocol (MCP) into your Symfony application, enabling AI assistants like Claude to interact with your data. This step-by-step tutorial guides you through building an MCP server for a customer management system, allowing AI to search customers, analyse orders, and query database information directly. Covers installation of the Symfony MCP SDK, creating MCP tools with PHP attributes, and connecting your server to Claude Desktop.

Greg Holmes

37 min read

Oct 18, 2025

Build a Discord bot to expose Raindrop.io instances

Learn how to build a Discord bot that syncs your Raindrop.io bookmarks to Supabase and makes them searchable via slash commands, bringing your bookmark catalog directly into Discord.

Greg Holmes

13 min read

May 12, 2023

Automatically top up your tru.ID balance

Adding automatic topping up of tru.ID balance from your backend server with tru.ID's Payment API.

Greg Holmes

36 min read

Dec 19, 2022

Web-Based Secure Password Reset with tru.ID and Vonage

Adding SIM Based verification to your web-based password reset flow.

Greg Holmes

35 min read

Apr 25, 2022

SSH Multi-factor Authentication with tru.ID

In this tutorial, you'll learn how to enhance the security of your SSH server by adding **tru.ID**'s PhoneCheck as an added security check when users attempt to log in.

Greg Holmes

11 min read

Apr 11, 2022

Converting Speech to Text in Flutter Applications

In this tutorial, learn how to use Deepgram's speech recognition API with Flutter and Dart to convert speech to text on iOS and Android devices.

Greg Holmes

A blurry image of two men sitting across from eachother appearing to be conversing with eachother.

3 min read

Mar 16, 2022

Tech Is Broken, It Is Time to Unbreak Tech! Let's talk..

How I support unbreak.tech, an initiative to speak out against the inequalities women suffer in the tech industry.

Greg Holmes

22 min read

Jun 22, 2021

Build a Birthday Congratulations Time Capsule with Go

Build a voicemail inbox with the intention of collecting birthday wellwishes for someone. This was an idea created during the lockdowns in the pandemic.

Greg Holmes

A header for the tutorial, a rectangle with a green background, Vonage's voice icon and an elephant resembling AWS Lambda's service

7 min read

Apr 13, 2021

Random Facts Voice Call With PHP, Uselessfacts and AWS Lambda

Create a PHP application and host it on AWS Lambda, listening for a specific webhook URL to be triggered when someone calls a specific phone number.

Greg Holmes

A header for the tutorial, a rectangle with a black background, GitHub's icon and the white text of 'GitHub'

8 min read

Feb 11, 2021

Build an Interactive Voice Response with Go

This tutorial will show you how to build an interactive voice response system using Go and the Vonage Voice API.

Greg Holmes

7 min read

Jan 14, 2021

Play an Audio File Into a Voice Call With Go

This tutorial will take you through the process of receiving a voice call and then playing an audio file into the call, using Go and the Vonage Voice API.

Greg Holmes

7 min read

Dec 03, 2020

Handle an Incoming Call With Go

In this tutorial, we're going to learn how to handle incoming phone calls with Vonage using a JSON array of actions called Call Control Objects (NCCOs).

Greg Holmes

A header for the tutorial, a rectangle with a blue background a phone, go and Vonage's voice icon.

5 min read

Nov 25, 2020

Text-to-Speech Voice Calls With Go

In this tutorial, we're going to learn how to make outgoing text-to-speech phone calls using Go and the Voice API.

Greg Holmes

A header for the tutorial, a rectangle with a blue background with the Golang's mascot the gopher.

6 min read

Nov 18, 2020

Receive SMS Delivery Receipts With Go

This tutorial will cover setting up a publicly accessible webhook and the functionality to receive SMS delivery receipts.

Greg Holmes

A header for the tutorial, a rectangle with a blue background and the Go mascot the gopher, Vonage's sms icon.

6 min read

Nov 03, 2020

Receive Inbound SMS With Go

A tutorial showing how to receive SMS messages into your backend Go web application with Vonage SMS APIs.

Greg Holmes

5 min read

Oct 01, 2020

How To Create a Pull Request With GitHub Desktop

A project built while working at Vonage on how to use phones to run a befriending service during the 2020 national lockdowns for the covid-19 pandemic.

Greg Holmes

9 min read

Sep 29, 2020

An Introduction To Git

A tutorial released during the event of Hacktoberfest 2020 introducing Git to those wishing to learn how to use it.

Greg Holmes

9 min read

Aug 05, 2020

Send Raspberry Pi IP Address on Boot in Node with Vonage

A tutorial on how to send the IP address of your Raspberry Pi on boot in Node with Vonage's Messages API.

Greg Holmes

65 min read

Jun 08, 2020

Befriending Service with Symfony and Vonage

A project built while working at Vonage on how to use phones to run a befriending service during the 2020 national lockdowns for the covid-19 pandemic.

Greg Holmes

35 min read

May 19, 2020

Home Surveillance System With Node and a Raspberry Pi

Learn to build your very own home surveillance system, whether it's to monitor your children, supervise a vulnerable family member or be a home security system.

Greg Holmes

20 min read

Apr 20, 2020

Verify User Registrations with Symfony

Learn how to extend an existing basic user authentication system, built-in Symfony 5, by implementing multi-factor authentication with the Vonage Verify API.

Greg Holmes

A header for the tutorial, a rectangle with symfony and react native icons

45 min read

Mar 17, 2020

How To Build an On-Call Application With React Native and Symfony

Create your own on-call application using React Native and Symfony PHP. The communication is handled with Vonage APIs.

Greg Holmes