Work With Me Here

Since Ev mentioned it, I'll mention it: Twitter is still hiring. We principally need engineers and operations people. You don't have to know Ruby or Rails or any particular thing. You mostly have to be smart, passionate, and nice.

The biggest thing we're working on at Twitter right now is stability. We know that we're incredibly lucky that our users put up with the site's frequent hiccups and outages. Explaining what's behind those hiccups is complicated, but the point is that if you want to help turn Twitter into a world-class, rock-solid part of the web's infrastructure, now's the time to get on board.

I'm not sure most people realize how small a company Twitter is. We're four engineers, two operations guys, and eight others that comprise user support, product management, interaction design, and various keep-the-business running type things. Similarly, we've been doing a lot more traffic than people think on way fewer servers than people think. We're happy that we've been able to get by, but it's time to take it to the next level. It's time to grow.

If you're interested, I'm happy to answer any questions. We've just hired a great VP of Engineering & Operations who'd also like to talk to you; ask him about writing the first version of QuickTime. Twitter is a great place to work, and the people are the best part.

Scaling the Scaling Debate

If you read my blog for web geeky Railsy sorts of things, you might be interested in the post I put up earlier today on the Twitter blog.

A lot of internet time has passed since the oft-referenced interview I did with Josh Kenzer back in March. We've learned a lot since then, but the most important lesson was that we're not building a web application, we're building a communications service for which the web is just another endpoint. Ruby has turned out to be a great language for building a communications service. With some work and coaxing, Rails has scaled up to keep pace with the demands on that service.

It's humbling that enough eyes are on us that bloggers fire up their text editors when I start bookmarking different technologies. Everyone at Twitter has done research, both at work and in their free time, towards the best technologies for our application. Ruby and Rails is the solution we've come back to for all kinds of reasons.

The Rails community is still young, and we've already seen amazing work done on the scaling front. As more Rails sites start pushing heavy traffic, the solutions available are only going to get better. If the community can stay friendly, smart, and agile, the only place to go is up.

Totally Obvious

I’m happy to announce that today is my first official day as a full-time Obvious employee.

If you’re a frequent visitor to the About Us page on Twitter, you’ll notice that I’ve been on there for a while. That’s because I’ve been doing contract work on Twitter since earlier this year.

Our recent trip to San Francisco was in part to see if I liked working with the Obvious folks and vice versa. I definitely did, and Timoni and I will be moving to San Francisco in the near future.

I’m looking forward to continuing to improve Twitter. It’s been great fun to work on something that so many people are enthusiastic about. But more than that, I’m looking forward to working with the awesome people at Obvious. It’s a great place to be.

Growl + Twitter Improved

I’ve got a full-blown Twitter addiction. There are plenty of ways to get my fix throughout the day: RSS, IM, SMS, Twitterriffc, or just looking at the dang site itself.

But I’m also addicted to Growl, the global notification system for Mac OS X (that Apple should be shipping with Leopard, cough). Throughout the day I have all sorts of data pouring across the bottom of my screen thanks to Growl, from incoming emails to IM status messages to completed downloads. Twitter updates would fit right in!

I’m not the first guy to have this idea. Matt Bidulph of Hackdiary put together a clever, terse Ruby script that does the job. Unfortunately, Matt’s script is a bit lacking in the features department.

So I’m breaking you off a piece of the remix with my own twitter_monitor.rb. It uses the absolute latest Twitter Ruby gem from John Nunemaker, which includes a lil’ patch from me to grab the full spectrum of data available from Twitter’s API.

My script adds the following features to Matt’s original:

• Retrieval, caching, refreshing, and display of your friends’ user icons.


• Use of ~/.twitter to store your username and password, as per the Twitter gem.


• Daemonization to work around Growl’s strained relationship with cron (see the Growl forum for more on this).


• Error checking all over the place to survive network failures, etc.

You’ll want to sudo gem install twitter daemons and make sure that growlnotify is being called from the right path before you fire this thing up. Once you do, expect a warm fuzzy feeling every 15 minutes (or whenever you set it for) as your friends’ latest musings float by.

Ahh. Twitter.

Twittering About Macworld

Got Macworld fever? You can follow Macworld at Twitter and, if you’re so inclined, contribute to the stream of updates. The early posts were mostly “I’m excited!” and “I hope they announce this thing!” but it looks like it’s turning into something useful.

Know a site that’s doing good Macworld coverage? Drop a comment.

Twitterpating

I didn’t really get Twitter at first blush, but it’s growing on me. Maybe it’s just the welcoming glow of a young online community populated by cheerful early adopters, but there’s something wholesome about the site. It has the honesty of early blogging, when the idea of keeping a public record of your day-to-day life was still exciting.

We’ve since discovered that blogging is far too long a form for such mundanity, but Twitter’s 160 characters are the ideal length for terse, informative updates about one’s life. It’s the personal activity equivalent of del.icio.us. I want to see what my friends are finding on the web, but I don’t necessarily want to see a whole blog post about each link.

There are a couple of things that I think Twitter could benefit from:

• Integration with AIM status messages. Many of my friends use iChat or other IM clients that allow them to set their “available status”—that is, an “away message” without marking yourself as away. These status messages perform much the same function of Twitter, albeit without the sense of a timeline and other social aspects of the site. Only having to set my status once would be nice.


• Integration with Feedburner. I’d like to see Twitter updates mashed into friends’ combined blog + del.icio.us + Flickr ego feeds.

Those are both fairly particular uses for a service that’s surprisingly robust given its youth and refreshing single-mindedness. The site is really what you make of it once you’ve joined.

You can drop in on my twittering if you’re so inclined.