Developing Upwards: How To Break Twitter

What I'll Be Ranting About

Good development practices bring us quality code, confident systems, and missed launch windows. When do you refactor and when do you factor in the passing time? As engineers we need to design what is possible and capable. As programmers we need to turn imagination into reality without a physical product. As developers we need to bridge the gab between that engineered vision and the end product.

I also blog more personally over at my tumblr page.

I am available for small contracts, consultations, tutoring, and other development services. My "skills" as a technical writer are also available. If you've got anything you'd like to talk to me about or for me to see, drop me a line.

Friday, December 07, 2007

How To Break Twitter

So I haven't realized it, but my twitters from the last day or so have gone unposted. Twitter pod is great, but its completely silent about authentication errors, apparently. The root of the problem is that I have two twitter accounts: ironfroggy and pythoncoders, which I intended as an aggregator of python twitter accounts. At the very least, a place to find other pythoners on twitter. Now, I haven't been keeping up on pythoncoders, so I decided to log in and update the followings, only to realize I forgot the password. Here in lies the cause of my troubles.

The twitter "reset password" form does not take a username. Oh, no, it takes an e-mail address, which I have two accounts with the same of. I crossed my fingers, went through the process, and seemed to be brought back to my ironfroggy account, so I decided to figure it out later.

Somehow, this process leaves the account with an unknown password, probably random or even null, or for some reason the fact that they accept multiple accounts with the same e-mail is not taken into account in code paths that should care about it.

I'm waiting for a solution, Twitter.