Tweet Sweep

At long last, Tweet Sweep is ready for real users. Stripe is wired up, the queue workers are running, and the ability for even prolific Tweeters to go from sign-up to scheduled Sweeps without my intervention is entirely in place (I hope). Now it's on the internet and at the very least cleaning MY Twitter feed I can let it welcome folks in while I look for 2021's next project.

It took at least a month longer than I wanted it too, but I finally was ready for beta with Tweet Sweep. However, I immediately hit a beta failure!
My Twitter account had 5.5k Tweets in it. My friend Fred, however, turned out to have almost 60k Tweets. As soon as he attempted to do a Sweep the system fell over.
I had to quickly go back to the drawing board and build out the ability to upload your Twitter archive during onboarding. Having that JSON archive backed up to S3 made it possible to manage Sweeps of massive accounts like Fred's.

The final attempt started as part of my "one per month of 2021" digital product project. After listening to too much Indie Hackers during my move to the UK I decided the right route for the project was just to build it quick and dirty as a cloud software solution and charge money for the expensive parts (repeated and scheduled cleaning of your feed).

My first serious attempts during the COVID19 pandemic to build Tweet Sweep were focused on making it fully native so that I could make it free. However, trying to make it in electron and then in Swift UI really just drove home how much I did NOT know those languages. Coupling that with the extreme difficulties one has integrating the Twitter API, these attempts proved as ill-fated as my 2018 attempts.

I'll save you the suspense, I started working on the project a couple of months later after traveling for a bit. However, I abandoned it after a couple weeks. That would be the story until the 2020 Coronavirus Pandemic locked down NYC and I started working on the project in earnest.

At XOXO 2018 a lot of talks were about people who had been doxxed or harassed online - particularly on Twitter - using their past Tweets. I decided I wanted to delete my old Tweets, but doing a survey of the market at that time showed that all the tools were designed as "delete them all" tools. I decided to build one that would be a "delete some" tool