Stuart Herbert (Nov 22, 2008 at 06:00)
Talk at PHP North West 2008 (English - US)
On Thursday 14th August, twitter withdrew its free UK SMS alerts service, citing costs and an inability to negotiate acceptable fees with UK mobile networks. One week later, on Wed 20th August, twittex went live as a replacement service for UK twittex. So how did we do it, and what would we do differently next time? twittex is built on the power of PHP and the LAMP stack, relying on the symfony framework and MySQL 5.1 with the Q4M extension. In this talk, Gradwell dot com Technical Manager Stuart Herbert explains how the company went about designing and building twittex, the problems they faced along the way, and what - with hindsight - sprints like this should do differently next time.
Quicklink: http://joind.in/88
Nov 22, 2008, 15:06 by natts
Really interesting insight into what you did, and great to see you honestly analysing what you did right and wrong.
Timeline graphics were very cool too (what software was it? Mac-only?), apart from the way each of the days were spread out far too much.
(the guy that asked about how much you pay for messages, who got logged out of this site within an hour, weirdly)
Nov 22, 2008, 15:20 by BinaryKitten
Very good talk. Intersting beyond what hat i expected. Very well done and good luck with your "new project". As a side note, i had heard of tittex but not of any of the others..
Nov 22, 2008, 21:44 by Anonymous
Very interesting to have a talk which considers the *commercial* aspects of rushing a product to market - we've all been there, but usually fretting the technical aspects!
Adrian
Nov 22, 2008, 22:14 by Anonymous
Brilliant talk, well presented, and very interesting story!
Nov 24, 2008, 09:21 by Anonymous
One of the most interesting talk of the day. Valuable information specially on the "What went wrong" part.
Mistakes are the best way to learn...
Nov 24, 2008, 09:27 by GingerDog
Great talk - perhaps my favourite (with my non-coding hat on).
Your honesty was really useful, as it's often hard to find such insights into project management.
I had heard of twittex - but must have looked when it was 10p a message and thought it was interesting, but perhaps too expensive. I don't use twitter anyway.
Nov 24, 2008, 13:01 by Anonymous
Very interesting and useful. Will be trying something similar with my team as soon as I can!
Nov 25, 2008, 08:57 by zedzdead
The highlight of the conference, Stuart's presentation was informative, witty, and relaxed, for what must have been a stressful project.
I loved that he could talk about what they did wrong. Having good, solid, reliable, reusable systems means that re-use is easy and development of new projects can be achieved quickly.
Nov 25, 2008, 09:29 by am_doherty
Slick, honest, humourous and well-paced presentation. Pleasures, perils and pitfalls of rushing an app to market when time is of the essence.
Good use of timeline software to pace the story of how it had been anticipated, how it was, and how it ought to have been.
Dec 3, 2008, 21:14 by philipnorton42
Interesting talk about what sort of lessons there were to learn from marketing Twittex.
It was well presented and honest with a few 3D time lines.
This talk make a nice change to the morning of heavy coding talks.
Nov 22, 2008, 15:05 by Anonymous
Really interesting insight into what you did, and great to see you honestly analysing what you did right and wrong.
Timeline graphics were very cool too (what software was it? Mac-only?), apart from the way each of the days were spread out far too much.
(the guy that asked about how much you pay for messages)