I applaud Twitter for delaying its scheduled maintenance to allow tweets to come in from Iran regarding the Iranian election. Twitter delayed its maintenance till the next day and implemented it at 1:30 a.m. Iranian time, when most Iranians would be asleep. Of course, everyone is blogging about this, but I feel compelled to blog because I have a semi-unique perspective. Really I do. :-)
I would like to say "hats off" not just to Twitter management but to the network engineers, sys admins, and programmers who handled the rescheduled maintenance tasks so effectively while the entire world was watching. Those of us in IT know that upgrades hardly ever go smoothly. But Twitter and their network hosting service carried out what Twitter is calling a "critical network upgrade to ensure continued operation of Twitter" in less than the planned one hour. They finished ahead of time! According to Twitter, the upgrade significantly increases network capacity. Perhaps it was something mundane like disabling a hard-set "speed 100" command so an interface would auto-negotiate to Gigabit speed. Or perhaps it was more complex. Either way, we IT people know how much can go wrong, even with something simple like auto-negotiation. So, hats off to the engineers! We makers of things (engineers, sys admins, Twitter developers) come through again!
It's been a long journey, but I am finally able to post a Makers of Things blog post about something I made. I made an iPhone app! I had lots of help. :-) It's called iCertify and it's a set of flash cards to help people pass the Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) certification exam. You can learn more about it here. You can buy it at the iTunes app store.
