“Emoji composer is now at 100% on Twitter” | Hacker News Reader

“Emoji composer is now at 100% on Twitter”

twitter.com

59 pointslogic19 comments

This is likely getting upvoted because it shouldn't take that long to ship a damn emoji picker / this use of resources is why Twitter is in decline, etc.

From a QA perspective, an emoji picker, with emoji searching and color setting, is tricker than it looks. For example, which emoji would you expect to see for a search query of "happy"? http://i.imgur.com/HU3sP7N.png

(Actually, why isn't the smiling cat a result for a "happy" query?)

3.5 years, though?

FYI, I'm not sure if it's part of the standard, but you can easily get a list of keywords for the search feature you mentioned http://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-list.html (though it looks like Twitter is using a different/augmented set of keywords)

"easily" if all you care about is English (unless I missed links to translations).

(You didn't)

The dev clarified that this was a side project of theirs, which is why it took so long.

I'm imagining a product owner and a bunch other stake holders sitting in a meeting room adding a bunch of keywords to each emoji. Or just copying a list from somewhere on the Internet and filtering it (my bet would be on this).

EmojiOne already do this.

Discord (the chat application targeted at gamers) had it shipped much quicker and it works as well. They had it come with searching and skin colour setting too.

Without the background story, it's hard to tell whether this is a ridiculous or justified amount of time.

Does anyone know the full story?

Do you really need to know the full story? 3.5 years ago somebody started working on an emoji picker.

Perhaps he was only working on it 1 day a month, but even if thats the case, there is even a wtf that a side project made it into the main release.

How does somebody even stay interested and passionate about such a small piece of work for so long?

Uhh the full story is kinda really important here.

I dont know how "important" it is, but I'm sure interested!

> How does somebody even stay interested and passionate about such a small piece of work for so long?

He probably scratched his own itch.

He said in a reply "I never said i was working on this full time, it was a hackweek project I've been working on at low priority"

[0] https://twitter.com/tw/status/812221656005386240

Yeah but it's twitter, a massive organisation with lots of programmers. Did whoever is in charge of the product decide an emoji picker was required and commission it? Or did Tom just decide to do it for fun?

Did it have anything to do with people leaving earlier this week :) (joke)

Here's an interesting take on the development of Twitter by Jonathan Blow. https://youtu.be/k56wra39lwA?t=448

I wondered about this before I saw this video as well. For all their dev capacity, Twitter is arguably a product with a lot of problems.

1. Shipping is good. 3,5 years may seem bad, but it's much better than never, which is probably what this guy is celebrating. Having worked in big tech companies, where you basically get nothing done because of broken process and politics, I get why he is happy about this

2. lol, 3,5 years is still ridiculously slow. Sure there can be technical difficulties, sure it can be a side project, but that's a really bloody long time, companies are built and make dozens of millions in that time. I could probably build a faster twitter with a good team in that time.

It's hard to see which is the stance here, I'm happy for the guy for shipping, but it makes me kind of lol. Our industry is stupid sometimes.

That's awesome... thanks to all who worked on it!

I empathize celebrating a work project accomplishment. On the other hand, I'm perplexed by the dilemma of tarnishing my company's image, given all it's recent tribulations, devaluing my equity as a result.

Maybe I'm giving too much weight to single individual's effect on altering public opinion (stock price).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com