5 things we learned in building A Feed Apart

A Feed Apart is a web app that used the Twitter and Flickr APIs to capture tweets & photos created during An Event Apart Boston 2009.

Nick Sergeant and I wrote it the night before the conference, and released it the next morning. Once Jeffrey Zeldman starting tweeting about it, people got really excited. We were absolutely psyched.

By the end of the conference, we'd racked up more than 4000 uniques, visitors had spent an average of 25 minutes on the site, and a handful of conversations were interrupted with “Oh, you're the guys who made that? Cool!”

Apply for the Twitter whitelist early

100 requests per hour limit should be enough for a personal app, so you needn't rush in. In our case, we had hundreds of attendees tweeting, and were archiving thousands of tweets throughout the conference. The first day was rough because the application process is not instantaneous, and we lost out on a lot of useful twitter conversation because of it. We applied at the beginning of Day 1, and were whitelisted that evening. (read more about the Twitter API rate limit)

Small scope, high quality

I'm sure you've heard this everywhere. Build fewer features than you come up with. The ones you do build, make reliable, consistent, intuitive, fast, etc. Realize the dimensionality of adding a feature. Each one needs care on so many levels.

Don't forget that you're attending a conference

There were a lot of times that one or both of us were embroiled in some bug, or finishing up some portion of the site that we missed out on the subject matter experts we were there to see. This was made up for by the positive reception of A Feed Apart, but we wouldn't recommend it. Next time, we'll start two days in advance instead of one.

Sketch it out first

Nick sketched out his layouts and design ideas. I sketched out the flow of data between services and the DB. It allowed us to get an enormous amount done in the night before the conference started.

Buddying up can help motivate you

If you can find someone to work with that is just as excited about an idea as you are, then it's time to take action. If you work together, take small steps, and take a minute to talk now and then about what you've accomplished in the past 15/30/60 minutes, the wheels of motivation get greased.

Learn what motivates you, and if you feel that tug, then start something! It doesn't have to be a web app. You could design a tee-shirt, live-blog a session, keep track of the various foods everyone was eating and create an infographic telling us all how fat we've gotten. Sky's the limit.

This definitely won't be our last AEA, so find us at the next one, and let's make something cool!

Related Articles

If you found this enticing, then you might enjoy reading about the programming that went into it. Read more about that at How we built A Feed Apart (using Django, Twitter, and Flickr)