Archive for March, 2009
twu.li starts to grow. We track almost 8000 twitterers for their updates and collect the URLs. This takes more and more time (there is quite some potential for optimizing it by requesting things in parallel). Right now, that’s about 3 hours to do a full scan (and it will get worse). New URLs can therfore show up with quite a delay. To alleviate that, we implemented a simple priority queue system. The result? The more URLs someone tweets, the more often we will read your timeline. Tweeting less drops the priority for this user and we will use longer intervals. So twitterers like timoreilly will get scanned more often than the huge bulk, that doesn’t tweet as often.
One more step to make twur.li really useful.
March 16th, 2009
I haven’t written the last week, and I guess the suspense is killing all 3 of you, that read this blog.
On day 4 (the day before Cruise instead of cc.rb, but after much fiddling with XML configuration files and Rake tasks, I gave up and returned to cc.rb. It works, is relatively easy to set up and suits our needs fine. Why bother?
Day 5, the friday, came and we had to do some last minute changes to a project that was launching on that day (no, we don’t believe in taking it easy). Then the actual work started with me grabbing Andrea and Keith and walking them through a complete Cucumber, RSpec, Implementation phase of the first feature. This took quite a bit longer than expected, but gave a good introduction of the BDD concept to the two. After that, they started to implement more of the UI functiionality, while I started working on the backend that talks to Twitter.
After a pizza break, work went really smooth and we made great progress. Twur.li was able to collect the twitter stream of it’s friends, extract the URLs and store them in the database. Andrea and Keith even managed to make a good looking layout. When Flöre and Kaspar arrived for the first Zurich Twitter Beer around 18:00, the system was up and running and started to look like what I was envisioning.
Well done, and I hope that Andrea and Keith both learned something and had fun as well. I know I did!
The last week both Andrea and Keith were away (school and holidays respectively) and I took the opportunity to tinker with twur.li and expand it’s features so that it actually does what it’s supposed to do: gather the URLs of the people you are following.
Right now, we are reading over 4000 users twitter streams and have collected almost 30’000 urls. There are Atom feeds for users and friends of users, a lighting fast search engine and lot’s of ideas on how to move on…
So, if you are on twitter, follow @twurli and then visit twur.li/yourtwittername and twur.li/yourtwittername/friends to see what your friends are linking to.
March 14th, 2009
Today was spent setting up infrastructure. Part of this sprint is to learn new things, so we took the opportunity to play around with some of the new features of Rails 2.3.
The best thing so far is the templating system, that allows you to define which gems, plugins and other files for your rails app. See below for the template we developed. It’s based on the Rails Template Post by Pratik Naik.
Another new thing we have tried out: Clearance, a authentication system with Cucumber features. We extended it to handle usernames (following Pikus Blog post.
We didn’t get around to implement the Continuous Integration server (we are going to try Cruise by Thoughtworks, instead of the usual cruisecontrol.rb. We’ll see how this works out.
So – the teaser page is up, see twur.li. By following twurli you will be notified when there are news about the site and what it does.
What it does? The name gives a clue…
For the geeks: the template for the Rails app:
March 4th, 2009
Not much news today. Most of the day was spent on client work. I had the fun task of calming down everyones nerves – there are still two deadlines to meet this week, before we can fully embark on building the Twitter app that I need for my day to day work.
I thought about features and design while on the train today and had tons of ideas. I think I have pared them down enough to actually being able to deliver something on friday. This turns out to be a really difficult task, there is so much that we “could” do (and things that would make the app really shine). I have decided on the bare minimum of features (with an eye towards extending them)
I told a few people about the name and the functionality – so far the reactions were good.
Tomorrow we will unveil the name of our app and set up the infrastructure, so that coding can begin with minimal fuzz on friday.
March 3rd, 2009
A new web site, that we developed launched today: ZermattSoundz.ch, the companion site to Europe’s highest open-air concert, April 18/19. It features Eisblume, Ich + Ich, Materia and Die Fantastischen 4.
It was designed by our partners Création and developed with Radiant on Ruby on Rails.
Well done, team!
March 3rd, 2009
The last few months have been furious. Not only have we moved to the new offices, but Keith Bingman has joined us as on a regular basis, and Andrea Szabo is our intern for the next 18 months, while she’s becoming an application developer. Quite a few projects have been made, a new website is on it’s way. We’ve had a lot of client work and more is yet to come, but we thought, it might be fun to do something for ourselves for a change.
So this week we prepare for a pet project that hopefully will launch on Friday, March 6th.
This is the plan:
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Monday: Register domains and Twitter users – done, and the domain names we got have a certain cutie factor…
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Tuesday: Regular work on client projects and I will be writing the specs while travelling
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Wednesday: Setup work environment: Rails 2.3, Github account, setup web servers, setup continuous integration server, implement Clearance (because it looks neat), maybe get a sketch of the UI and a logo done.
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Thursday: More regular client work
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Friday: Get to work: Build the app and launch the first version around 17:00 CEST. Then “ruby beer” at our offices to celebrate
So what does the application do? No details yet, but it scratches an itch of mine, it’s a Twitter app, and it should be doable until friday.
Oh – and it has a cute name….
March 2nd, 2009
