twitter

Since starting a new job tends to involve a lot of reflection on the prior one, I’ve spent some time recently thinking about my time at Twitter. While there were both good and bad parts, I generally feel like I had a few great opportunities to participate in product design and understand how even simple looking products tend to have a lot of hidden edge cases and adjustments to smooth those over.

I generally use the example of analytics.twitter.com. Superficially, this site has a very direct purpose–to show you numbers associated with your Tweets. But as my team started exploring a landing page which would show aggregated impressions, we found all sorts of cases which would surprise our customers.

Friday, February 24th, 2017 was my 1999th day of employment at Twitter, and my last.

I’ve been a bit nostalgic about this, so I reread my initial thoughts on joining Twitter in 2011 to laugh at how young and naïve I was five and a half years ago. I know that when I first started I didn’t really have a great idea of what people did in fast growing companies. Did they jump around and try to work on the most critical problem at the time? Did they focus on small areas and grow them into large ones?

Now that 2013 is pulling to a close I feel the pull that anyone who has ever set pen to paper (metaphorically, in this case) feels now - the thick, crushing desire to “bang out” a top 10 Greatest Hits list before retreating sleepily back into the embrace of a thick holiday sweater for a few weeks’ hibernation. I had a great time in 2013 - got SUPER married to the love of my life, participated in Twitter’s IPO and then moved into a fulltime Software Engineer role while finishing a set of Stanford graduate CS courses. Busy year.

Twitter, naturally, was a common theme. It’s where I participated in and documented many of the significant parts of my year. Of course, many of my friends don’t use or even understand the service, so to them I’ve dropped off the face of the planet. Inspired by the great 2013.twitter.com retrospective, I thought I’d put together some of my notable moments into a smörgåsbord for those friends to feast upon.

Twitter’s Javascript-based third party offerings include buttons and embedded content, which are handy for putting Twitter content into your website. Unfortunately, they break when included in a Chrome extension, due to the use of protocol-relative URLs. Luckily there’s a way to fix the problem, although it requires a bit of extra code.

Since starting my job at Twitter, I’ve spent a lot of time on dev.twitter.com, either reading documentation or posting on the discussion group. I’ve also been Tweeting a lot more, and I tend to switch back and forth a lot throughout the work day. My browsing habits tend to lead to a bunch of open tabs in Chrome, and I realized that I was losing productivity.

… have met and in many cases exceeded the expectations I had when thinking about joining the company. Obviously I’m still in the honeymoon period and things are still moving fast, but the energy and culture of the place have been inspiring. I’ve found a few things particularly worth gushing over:

…was August 25th, 2011. On September 6th, 2011 (four years and two days after I started my first Silicon Valley job at Google) I will be starting a position as Developer Advocate at Twitter.