This is a more formal version of a comment I made here a year or so ago. I wanted to write it up and put it out there because I still get comments on this over a decade later. Lots of people assume that it shows how silly Twitter was but honestly it was a product of the restrictions we had on our environment, and the time we had to solve things quickly vs the right way.
I do love telling the story though. It is very much "startup engineering" at its finest. =)