Wow it’s been an exciting couple of days! Tweetrad.io has received nearly 28,000 pageviews in the past 2 days thanks to a successful Hacker News article, a blog post from Mashable, a celebrity tweet from Alyssa Milano, and subsequent viral action on twitter. I’m pleased to say that Tweetrad.io for the most part has stood up well to this traffic spike.

Here’s a brief write-up on the technology behind Tweetrad.io, how the system evolved and the reasons behind our technology choices.

Tweetrad.io was initially born out of a weekend hacking session where I was playing around with the idea of a ruby daemon that would search twitter and then fire off a configurable ruby script. The first script I wrote to demonstrate the capabilities of what at the time I was calling “Twobots (twitter robots)” was to just run the tweet text through OS X’s say command. I brought the project into work on Monday to show my coworkers and we all got a good laugh out of listening to the voices read various humorous and mostly NSFW tweets. Edwin immediately saw the entertainment potential and we decided to partner on it as a side project. read more