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This is a PowerPoint Presentation (and extraction of the contents) I made as per a couple of friends’ request (@EmadAshi and @AmrEldib) to show how OAuth works along with Twitter and how easy it is to cache OAuth credentials.

As I was doing related work for TweetToEmail. I felt a PowerPoint presentation will be even better than a blog post for this one, but here you get the two.

The Presentation

The Contents

Application Registration

• A Twitter user creates a Twitter Application
  • If the application is web based, it needs to provide a URL. “Localhost” is not accepted as a domain for this URL
• A Twitter Application gets two pieces of information
• Consumer Key
• Consumer Secret
• A Twitter Application will use these in all coming requests.

Initializing The Process

• User comes to the application and it decides to authenticate against Twitter
• Application makes a request using Consumer Key and Secret to obtain “Oauth Request Token”, which consists of two parts
  • Token
  • Token Secret
• Application makes authentication URL including the “Oauth Request Token” parameter, and optionally a “Call-back URL” (if different than default URL in first step)

Today (technically yesterday, since it’s 3:26 AM already while I’m starting this), Mr. Adam Mohamed Meligy finally arrived home, after staying 9.5 days in nursery. This –dear audience- given Mr. Adam arrived to our world only in October 5, 2009, a date that the entire world will (sooner or later) always remember!

Mr. Adam is now taking a personal cover, pretending to be a normal baby, while he is pretty professional, he cannot sometimes hide his special natures, being relatively quiet compared to normal babies, and highly responsive to touches and (believe it or not) spoken notes/requests.

These are things that the world will remember once Mr. Adam finishes his first big achievement in the field he will take up for living (God Willing). Some other small details matter more to the family, both his grandparents –for example- note him as their first grandchild. I –personally- recognize him as my extra chance in life! If I fail to manage to be another Anders Hejlsberg/Martin Fowler, Scott Guthrie/Brad Abrams, or Scott Hanselman/Rob Conery/Phil Haack (still trying), Mr. Adam has a bigger chance; else wise, he’ll be digging his road as a notable figure in some different field (God Willing).

Few minutes ago, I saw @mShady, my dear friend (Real life friend, not just on twitter) tweeting:

RT @ASGEgypt: RT @scrum_coach: Should the team be allowed to drop the retrospective? http://bit.ly/bkOgv #scrum #agile #lean #xp #kanban

I checked the post and found the options are:

1. Yes, It’s their process why not?
2. No, explain to them and work through why the retrospective is so important.
3. Maybe, if they are no longer a team then why continue with Scrum?
4. Only do retrospectives once a quarter and build up a good list of things to change.
5. Yes, the process will take care of itself we don’t need to watch it that closely. After all it’s common sense!

Interesting question! Not the most important topic in Scrum but like the way Agile works in general, if you play with it wrong, it is an indicator you have something else wrong as well before that, so, it gives you an alert.

See the rest of the blog post. I find the options my main interest, and wanted to share with you here how I answered this question:

Yesterday I changed my twitter username from @Mohamed_Meligy to just @Meligy.

Why?

I have been thinking about this step for a long time, as my tweets are relatively long, and when I want to to allow people to re-tweet. With my old username, I used to have to write at max 120 characters per tweet to allow re-tweet (leaving 20 characters out of the real 140 characters limit to “RT @Mohamed_Meligy: ”). With my new twitter username I can use up to 128 characters (leaving 12 for “RT @Meligy: ”). I know I ‘m a person who can make nice use of those 8 extra characters, but is this worth doing? For sometime I thought: No.

My old username has some nice features. First, it includes my full name, so, that’s nice for people who don’t know me very well. Second, it has been around for over a year and over ~2390 tweets! That’s something!! People got used to using this twitter username when replying to me (mentioning me) and I did my best to put it everywhere in my Google and Facebook profile and blog and everywhere, and also used it with many twitter applications that require entering username/password.