Mastodon has replaced my debug Twitter client on my iPhone’s dock
Dave LaMacchia
@dml
- 4 Followers
- 63 Following
- 33 Posts
iOS/macOS developer. Former twitter dev, former spam fighter. Defendant US vs. LaMacchia. Tooting toots tootly.
Really cool that people who have left twitter as part of the madness this week are getting together to do a day of volunteering (as we used to do as employees)
For those of you working on software, I hope you get to work with some of them in the future and I hope I get to again, too. They're the reason I stayed so long in this job.
Thanks to all the tweeps for an amazing decade! 🫡💙
When you're building a product for people around the world, you have to build something that can tolerate widely varying network conditions, client hardware configurations, and more. We did a good job, but there's always room for improvement.
A lot of us who built this service are now back on the job market. People who worked on this service have invaluable experience scaling a system to support millions of people posting and consuming content in real time.
People who know me know that I value remote work and support for remote was one of the reasons I joined the company. Having a global team meant that we were better structured to build a global product.
One of my earliest memories as a tweep was learning about how people around the world used Twitter. The features that were important to someone in Brazil or Japan were very different than Germany or the United States. This awareness shaped every aspect of the company.
Some people have complained that the company moved slowly, but I like to think that we moved with care and conviction. We conducted research and relied on data over instinct.
In my role I was also lucky to get to work with many non-engineering partners across Twitter. This gave me a huge appreciation for the many talented people who were necessary to keep the service running.
This included sales, marketing, trust & safety, bizdev, legal, compliance, research, data science, data services, and so much more. Supporting a service used by millions of people around the world and being in compliance with local regulations: that requires a lot of coordination.
This job was also the first time I got to work with a world class Design team. I also feel like I learned a tremendous amount from some of the best designers in the industry.
On many occasions I got to work with a single designer and built features that people who use the iOS app love. This partnering was one of my favorite parts of working at Twitter.
There's some great examples of Twitter's iOS code that have been open sourced, if you're curious. The code to parse Tweets, the network stack, image pipeline, text editor, and logging layer are all on github. Check them out:
When I joined Twitter, the team took a chance on me. A few years before, I had decided to learn iOS development because my skills weren't modern. I learned to code for iOS, put an app in the App Store, and made enough to afford an iPad
The iOS team at Twitter was full of experts who had worked on huge indie apps or had helped build the iPod, Apple TV, or OSX itself. The 9 years that followed was an incredible learning experience and there's still so much I would have liked to learn had I stayed