AKQA

For the launch of FIFA 12, AKQA created a campaign in which fans knitted the world's longest football scarf together. Fans posted a tweet through a web page or directly on Twitter, and a knitting machine knitted the tweets into the scarf one after another, live on a webcam.

I built the backend: a .NET service on Azure that read the Twitter stream for the campaign hashtags, filtered the tweets for profanity, and queued them as jobs for the knitting machine. The hard parts were the volume of the stream and filtering correctly, because every tweet that passed ended up in the scarf, in public and on camera.

As a Senior Software Engineer, my responsibilities included:

• Building a .NET service on Azure that reads the Twitter stream for the campaign hashtags
• Filtering tweets for profanity before they reach the knitting machine
• Queuing the tweets as jobs for the knitting machine
• Building the backend of the campaign site in ASP.NET MVC, including posting tweets through OAuth
• Writing unit tests with NUnit and Rhino Mocks, built in TeamCity