It went like this:
Andrew: This service adds a moustache to any face! It’s awesome!
Me: I’m busy working.
A: What if we create an extension that would add a moustache to every face! It’d be awesome!
Me: I’m busy working.
A: It’d take only a few minutes anyway.
Me: Ok, whatever…
In the next 7 minutes or so I created a Chrome extension that puts a moustache on every face on every page. It took us another half an hour to test it, fix an occasional bug, draw a few icons, write a description for the Chrome gallery and pay $5 developer fee to Google since I never used my own account for extensions yet.
We tweeted about it and it went viral, to our surprise. We found out that the code doesn’t perform well on the Cedar stack of Heroku, so we had to redeploy to the old Bamboo – all while the usage levels were growing exponentially. Almost immediately it became obvious that our Face.com API key wouldn’t be enough to process all the requests and we asked to raise the limit (fortunately, they raised our limit promptly – thanks). In a matter of minutes we received an email from the American Mustache Institute, and in a matter of hours people began blogging about it (and not only in English). Our servers are still unable to process all the requests; we have to drop some of them and the tweets keep coming.
It was a good fun for a Friday afternoon pairing with the awesome @teabass!
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