Presented for you perusal is a little Twitter app built on top of a Flask server and a Backbone.js front end. The app makes use of the Birdy Twitter API client to retrieve the latest 10 tweets from any user's timeline, and continues to poll for updates once a minute. There's also a nifty little tool that enables you to quickly filter the currently loaded statuses by the Tweet text.

• First, clone this repository and cd into the root directory
• You'll want to get a virtual environment setup so that you can install the Python dependencies cleanly. Make sure to install virtualenv if you have not done so before you go further.

$ virtualenv venv
$ source venv/bin/activate

• Now that that is done, you can pip install -r requirements.txt to pull down Flask and the other Python deps.
• This will take a minute, so if you haven't already got these handy, now's a good time to go grab you Twitter app credentials at https://apps.twitter.com/
• Once you have a Twitter App registered, you can retrieve your Consumer Key and Consumer Secret.
• In the application folder, you need to cp secret.py.example secret.py and add your creditials to that file.
• You should now be able to run the server by issuing a python runserver.py command in the base directory.
• Depending on your setup, you may get some complaints like the following:

InsecurePlatformWarning: A true SSLContext object is not available

This does not, however, appear to be a problem for the purposes of this exercise.

• If all goes well, the app should be running on http://0.0.0.0:5000

• The browser assets live in application/static.
• The stylesheets are written in scss and compiled automatically by the server via Webassets whenever changes are detected. Unfortunately, Webassets does not seem to be able to listen to changes in files referenced by @import statements, so it's necessary to trigger a rebuild manually by changing something in the top level file. Keep in mind that previous builds are being cached in a .webassets-cache folder that is created when you first start the server and navigate to the site. These cached versions will be used if ever your top level file is equal to a previous state, even if other changes are present in your @imported files.

• The client side application is written in ES2015 syntax using ES2015-style imports/exports.
• Node package manager is used to manage the dependencies and trigger Browserify/Babelify transforms and bundle all the modules.
• The app should hopefully work out of the box without rebuilding, but if you should need to rebuild, you can simply issue an npm start command at the top of the javascripts directory (You will obviously need npm installed first).
• Issuing an npm run uglify command will minify the built bundle.

• Improve test coverage.
• Properly handle HTTP errors in the browser.
• Persist tweets to a database and implement features like paging and marking tweets as "Read".
• Investigate Twitter's streaming protocol as well as pushing updates to the browser via Websockets.