The initial idea I was presented with was to create a notification system to entice advertisers into trying a tool called Audience Explorer. During my first week a designer also mocked up some notification concepts

To clarify my plan, my mentor at Twitter helped me create a design doc and break up the project using a method called "Crawl, Walk, Run," where the crawl stage represented the bare minimum I wanted to complete and run represented my stretch goal.

The crawl stage was to create a basic notification that linked the user to Audience Explorer. The walk stage was to migrate my notification into a generalized notification service and add personalized information to the notification. The run stage was to add more ways of sending notifications, like email, and make it easier to show the notification in other places.

Above is a page called Ads Manager. To create the backend I figured how notifications worked in Ads Manager to begin with and added my desired functionality. Ads Manager turned out to only be able to show simple text notifications so I ended up creating a new class of notifications so most decisions about my notifications appearance would be made in one centralized place in the backend.

Once I could send a notification with correct information to the front end, I worked on making the notification look the way I wanted it to. I hadn't done much frontend work before, and had never worked in JavaScript so this was actually one of the more challenging parts of the project for me. I used a React element called "Upsell" created by Twitter's user interface team, but as it was a brand new element I ended up having to alter it a lot to make it look right (to the left is my first attempt at making the notification appear).

At this point I had completed the first stage of the project and was ready for push it to production, but my code kept failing to merge at the last minute. It turned out that I was using a React element that hadn't yet been added to the production version of Twitter's website and wouldn't be added for a couple of weeks.

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To ensure my work wouldn't fall behind others' commits, I instead pushed a turned off version of my notification with the offending React element removed. I continued working on my project and once Twitter was updated I was able to alter a few lines of code and turn on my notification.

So my notifications wouldn't be limited to the webpage I made the basic version of my notification in, I migrated the backend of the notification to a separate notification service. Initially I was going to create the service from scratch, but I ended up finding a half finished notification service that another team was working on in Twitter's shared code base. This notification service had been set up to periodically push notifications, but the part that was meant to handle web notifications had never been completed. I chose to build off of it and add functionality so the webpage I was working in could check if there was a notification to show every time the page reloaded.

In order to show information in the notification that would be more relevant to the user I personalized the notifications by using another intern's project. One of the teams I was working with had an intern who was working on generating things relevant to certain groups on Twitter like commonly used hashtags or commonly engaged with handles. I made my notifications access the database she was working on so the notifications would show information specific to a user's followers.

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At the time, a new Game of Thrones season was airing so I ended up having to randomize which of the top ten results were shown because only things about Game of Thrones would be shown otherwise.

As a final step I began experimenting with creating email notifications. I didn't have time to get a design for the email so this part was never completed, but I was able to add basic email capabilities to the backend of my project.