Philippe Casgrain is leader of the CocoaHeads of Ottawa/Gatineau one of the very first groups to make TheCodeFactory their meeting place. The CocoaHeads are a great group and have grown steadily since coming on board. They recently had a hackathon at TheCodeFactory one weekend to develop a web app for the Olympics. The following is my interview with Philippe with respect to Tweety10 development.

Where did you get the idea for Tweety10?

Mark Thistle got the idea. He already had HockeyTweet on the app store, and thought we could re-use some of the basic functionality. He sent us an email in the first days of 2010 and we all agreed it was a great idea.

Who contributed?

There were seven, then eight of us. In no particular order: Philippe Guitard, Mark Thistle, Josh Svatek, Brad Goss, Rod Cater, Jason Brennan, Brian Pirie and myself.

What was your greatest triumph?

Definitely to get seven independent developers with all sorts of constraints in the same room for eight hours, on a Sunday no less, so we could hammer out the first 80% of the app.

What was the biggest obstacle your team had to conquer? How did you do it?

Once the initial coding sprint was done, we knew we had the “other 80%” to do. The biggest problem became one of collaboration, and I suggested using BitBucket.org for doing it. It performed flawlessly, holding our wiki, issue tracker and code repository in a secure, safe and fast manner.

How does it feel to see your app in the iTunes store?

Really good! I am delighted to see it in use. We have more analytics coming in, so we’ll have final numbers soon since the Olympics are now over…

Tell me a bit about the technology you used?

The core was very much HockeyTweet, with its twitter client and lists of places. But aside from that, it’s a pretty simple list-displaying app. The cool thing is that all the data is live, pulled down from our server running on Google App Engine. We all learned how to do that from Mark, and that was pretty awesome.
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Anything else you can think of that I should know.
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Literally as we were submitting to the App Store, Twitter tweaked their OAuth mechanism’s identification from “oauth_pin” to “oauth-pin”. Needless to say, we scrambled quickly to fix that issue before submitting!
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Finally, this would not have been possible without the weekend hacking rate @ The Code Factory. Can’t thank you enough for this amazing space!
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Thank you Philippe

Filed under: Collaboration Corner, Featured, Guest Post, Ottawa, The Code Factory by Ian
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