Originally published on the Spaceman Labs blog by Joel Kraut on March 22, 2013.
Early this morning we and our friend Alex C. Schaefer launched a new project of special interest to iOS and Mac developers. WWDC Blast is a free service to inform you via SMS the very moment that WWDC tickets go on sale. With tickets having sold out last year in under two hours, there’s no better time to automate this. We won’t spam you, we won’t sell your information, we just like the idea of keeping people as informed as possible. Check it out.
Technically, this project was a fun one. It’s the first web app we’ve launched, and while the guts aren’t incredibly complicated, we’re integrating lots of cool services and frameworks to make some magic happen. We’re using Heroku, Twilio, S3, Twitter Bootstrap, MixPanel, and some other cool stuff that isn’t even user-visible yet. And the list goes on.
Most fun of all is that we put together the whole thing, soup to nuts, concept to launch, in under four days. That’s right: the initial idea was broached Monday morning. We launched early early Friday.
Not bad.
I heard WWDC notifiers are all the rage - so we built one for 2013! Free SMS notification when tickets go on sale.
Wild, the last minute email change that’s getting all the @WWDCBlast emails sent to spam - the domain name in our from address.
Sitting on an airplane, manually combing the user list at @WWDCBlast and contacting stragglers to get them all confirmed.
After a night of tweaking, upgrading, and testing – I feel even more confident in @WWDCBlast. We shouldn’t have any rate limiting issues.
We ran some dry runs for @WWDCBlast last night. Everything went great, which quells my anxiety quite a bit.
We’ve got some sweet new Do Not Disturb information for @WWDCBlast. Grab the vCard and whitelist us!
The best part about adding a paid tier to @WWDCBlast is that we’ve been able to heavily reinvest that money into making it even more solid.
Wow, @WWDCBlast has seen a crazy amount of new users today. If you haven’t signed up yet, it’s probably a good time to get in the queue.
RT @WWDCBlast: There are no more 415 numbers in available in San Francisco, we just bought them all.
Wild morning. After the press release, we made the hard decision to delay @WWDCBlast notifications so we could put out accurate information.
At least we fulfilled one of our low WWDC Blast goals of “not begin last”. Woo!
When we did WWDC Blast, Heroku kept things flexible. We were able to easily squeeze performance when needed, for a good price.
Working with phone numbers and the @twilio API again — having @WWDCBlast flashbacks.
Reminds me of the “pay to move the the front of the line” mechanic we used for WWDC blast. 😝 (people paid way more than I expected!)
When we did WWDC Blast years ago, the Twillio bit was terrifying. We had done lots of mock tests with dummy APIs, but didn’t really have any idea how well it would work, or how expensive the whole thing would be for the real deal. 😬