It is with great pleasure that I announce my latest open-source adventure in the form of Twiq.

Twiq is a little applet for Windows that allows you to quickly tweet a message you come up with and then get straight back to work.

Too many times I have forgotten something funny, useful or generally tweetable while I wait for a web browser and Twitter.com or a client to load. No longer! Twiq is always listening just a keypress away (Ctrl+Win+Space in fact) to get that tweet dispatched efficiently.

You can’t read tweets with Twiq, but then you’d get distracted from whatever you’re working on. The flow for creating a tweet with Twiq has been designed to be super-smooth. Ctrl+Win+Space brings up the program, and puts your cursor in the tweet box; 140 taps gets you a witty, thoughtful, or useful tweet; press Return and your tweet is dispatched; Ctrl+Win+Space gets rid of Twiq and you back to work.

By popular demand – a screenshot of Twiq in action:

Twiq is free and open-source. The code is on Github, and you can get the latest installer from there too.

One of the sessions I attended at Software Craftsmanship 2010 (the other being on Refucktoring) was called Robot Tournaments. This seemed extremely intriguing to me so I was there with the laptop out ready to try my hand at whatever this tournament was.

The idea of the project was to create a battlebot rewarding a rapid development cycle. There is a central tournament server which executes everyone’s scripts in various “rounds” of battle. You are pitted against all the other competitors in each round. The sooner you deploy something, the more points you got. The idea was to promote the concept that fast iterations are more rewarding than sitting working on a feature for a long period of time.

The game involved was Tic Tac Toe. You receive the current game board state as a parameter to your script, and you output a single integer which is the square you’d like to play in. Simples!

I often see people ranting one way or another in favour or against various source control packages. The most common one is Git vs SVN; SVN having been very popular for a long time, Git being somewhat the ‘young pretender’. As a result, in the open source space, there’s quite a mix of open source hosted source control options available.