In search of greater involvement & networking in the startup community, Aaron Smith, CEO of Cordis Technologies launched 'Yacket', a twitter-based app that basically collects opinion around the world with yes/no questions at a co-working space in Melbourne, Australia - 'York Butter Factory' and he chose 'Toobler' as their outsourcing partner for all their development operations.
TARGET
To build a Twitter based Q&A (questions with only two default answers - Yes or No )application with Deeper Demography Analytics.
Pivot 1 - Based on customer feedback yacket included two additional features in 2012 to the app. Yacket Battle which allows questions to be asked where the answer options are 2 twitter users and Multi-Option Questions where you are now able define the answers.
Challenges & Solution
Challenge 1
Reduce Lag when storing name and handle a new user with 'Twitter Following' count > 10 signs up via Twitter login.
Solution
Put the details of user registered into a queue, and a separate process listening to the queue will fetch the 'following' details from twitter api and insert into mysql table asynchronously.
We setup a SQS (simple queue service) queue to accept asynchronous requests to store the userid and tokens from large Twitter 'Following list' in RDS (MySQL). The beauty of the queue is that the queue will keep the data up to four days. We can use the AWS Asynchronous client so it won't hold up the web pages from loading and we're in no hurry to get it into the database. Additionally this decouples my logging from my application so any issues with logging will not bring down the application - the queue is scalable to handle traffic as needed. In addition to the above you want to design for horizontal scaling for a flexible, cost-effective architecture that can expand and contract based on usage.
Creation
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Technology
We choose the PHP Framework - Codeigniter since it plays well with the Agile Development and importantly it has one one of the best documentation and developer community.
PHP CodeIgniter
Codeigniter provides common structures to normalize web apps, assist productivity, and reduce repetitive coding.
Twitter API
The set of streaming APIs offered by Twitter give developers low latency access to Twitter's global stream of Tweet data. A proper implementation of a streaming client will be pushed messages indicating Tweets and other events have occurred, without any of the overhead associated with polling a REST endpoint.
Architecture
Aaron Smith
Founder, Yacket
One of the key aspects with working with your team at toobler , one of the difference your team has made is that your team is incredibly self - contained and your skills across entire life cycle of project , whether thats the study of User Experience to interface design to project management to having team leaders to all aspects of web development and in the end having somebody who can deal with errors around infrastructure particularly Cloud Infrastructure makes a big difference when an entire solution can be developed internally with a team like that. So that makes a huge difference.Aaron Smith Founder, Yacket