Tweet in the Park

Tweet in the Park was my first real attempt at building a web app end to end. At the time, it wasn’t driven by a desire to learn a specific technology so much as a desire to solve a very human problem: feeling disconnected from something you want to be part of.

In my youth, I’d been a fairly regular attendee of T in the Park, but had been unable to go the year prior. Texts and phone calls from friends never quite filled the gap. They were sporadic, often unintelligible, and usually arrived long after whatever moment they were describing had passed. Twitter, on the other hand, was quickly emerging as the de facto way to follow breaking news. With generous access to its API, it offered a stream of immediate, unfiltered reactions unfolding in real time.

Tweet in the Park was my attempt to harness that energy. By aggregating festival-related tweets into a single live feed, it created a shared space that reflected the mood of the event as it happened, a way to experience the festival from the outside without feeling entirely removed from it.

The project later picked up attention outside the tech community, including a feature in the Scottish Sun, which was both unexpected and gratifying. More importantly, it marked a shift in how I thought about building products. Less as technical exercises, and more as tools that help people feel connected, informed, or included in moments that matter to them.