Twittex - From Idea To Live in Seven Days

The document describes how a team at Gradwell built the Twittex service, which allows users to receive SMS messages from their Twitter feed, in just seven days. Key factors that allowed the quick development included leveraging existing infrastructure components at Gradwell that had been in place for years, such as load balancers, PHP servers, MySQL, and queue servers to power the core functionality. While the visible Twittex website was new, much of the underlying architecture was based on pre-existing systems that supported a quick launch timeframe.