Tony Robbins is awesome for many reasons. But the real reason we love Tony is that he broke our software. I know that sounds crazy, but like many product development guys, I love seeing outlier cases that push the boundaries of a product and see what it’s really made of. That is where the interesting stuff happens and you get to find out where your product fails.
Tony Robbins signed up for our twitter backup plan a couple of weeks ago. A few days ago, his personal assistant called us for support because his tweets weren’t backing up. I was surprised because Twitter backup is our most used service and is very stable and bug free. So we spent some time digging in a little deeper.
The problem turned out to be a combination of Twitter’s API limitations and Tony’s overwhelming popularity. He has over 1.4 million Twitter followers. The API call we were using to back them up only sends us 50 at a time. Well, it took so long to compile all 1.4 million in 50 user increments that before the backup could finish, a new one was ready to start. The new backup process saw the old process, thought it was hung, and shut it down. As a result, no backup ever finished because of Tony’s massive friends list.
We fixed the problem using a different API call that pulls users by user id instead of username and now everything works fine. So the moral to the story is to embrace your outlier cases. They do a great job of testing your product.
Luckily for us Tony’s team was understanding, particularly once they found out it was his popularity that caused the problem. So help us continue to test our outlier cases by making Tony Robbins even more popular… go follow him on Twitter.
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