Any thoughts about trust when bringing on a new employee with responsibility for crucial code of our software.

I'd suggest investing in a business (or businesses) of your own. A successful business will provide you with the greatest return on investment you will likely ever come across. There's no blueprint on how to do this - but there is definitely wisdom, strategies and tactics you can use to significantly increase your odds of success and maximize your ROI. If you're interested in learning more - give me a call. In any case - Best of Luck!

Yes, exactly what Twilio is capable of. If you need it for just your business, this can be done using simple scripts. Routing is actually the easy part. Voicemails are a bit more involved but they have you covered: https://www.twilio.com/docs/howto/voicemail

I have worked on projects handling transfer of large image files across multiple vendors and being served on web for different targets (mobile, web etc.). I have also implemented cloud and DevOps solutions for high volume/scale of data and transactions. While I could tell you a list of technologies which can be used - the problem here is more of design and architecture. So I will start with that. Also a lot of decisions are based on more information and the use case - so I will need information on certain aspects of your application. 1) For searching an image users will enter search terms. You will have to associate the search terms/tags to actual images. While there are multiple ways to do this association - what is the link between a search term and image in your case. Do you have a separate database/service which will link given search terms to given set of images? 2) Since you are talking about handling millions of images - they will need to be partitioned logically or bucketized for optimum way to store and search. Is there a natural distribution? Do your users access all the images all over the world? 3) For any data storage related to images - we will need to go one detail further. While relational DB might serve a lot of needs, there might be use cases where considering other storages will be needed. Some questions which will lead to answers are - what kind of data per image will be stored? How frequently this data might change? How many new additions will happen on this archive? How fast would you want the updates to be visible to users/consumers? 4) What kind of traffic do you expect roughly? This will decide a lot design around auto scaling, load balancing and other aspects. 5) I am not a front end expert - but similar principles of scaling would apply to front end stack. Though I can not necessarily answer what technologies might fit your needs best.

I've been developing web and iPhone apps for a while and I usually recommend to first use the provided sharing mechanisms. They provide great flexibility and as well don't require your app to request permissions on external networks. Using the iOS SDK sharing components will also save you precious development time. The most important part is the content that will be shared. On that side, make sure all the content has a unique URL, and can be properly consumed on all plateforms, desktop and mobile. Pay a particular attention to the head meta tags of those pages. Open graph and Twitter tags are not optional anymore and help driver a better visibility on the networks your content is being shared onto. Don't forget to track with an appropriate analytics tool how your users use the sharing module. Then you can evaluate the pertinence of building something custom.

Hi, I have been a PHP developer for 13 years and have experience building enterprise applications. What framework are you using? Most PHP frameworks have a built in authentication and authorization mechanism. For example, Yii has a builtin RBAC system that allow you to define a hierarchical permission system. If you're not using a framework or you just want to implement your own system for whatever reason then you can utilize Object Oriented Design and implement a Base controller (if MVC) that checks the permission for each request. That won't use a lot of if statements. Probably need more info, to give definitive guidance. Hope that helps.