One thousand, nine hundred and seventy tweets.

That’s my entire tweet history, fourteen years of my digital life (I guess more like the first seven, until I stopped tweeting around 2016).

That tiny number doesn’t really convey what Twitter meant to me: the relationships it created, and the opportunities I received. If I were to write all those words in a single story, I don’t think they’d have had the same impact. The power was in snippets of conversation over time.  

I joined in 2009, when I got my first smartphone. It was kind of exhilarating to be able to send your thoughts into the wild and see someone respond in real time – especially random people you’d never met (this was an era before major trolling). My circles of friends would banter publicly. I began to attend a lot of tech conferences, and I’d tweet my thoughts & reactions while I was there. The asynchronous and flat nature of Twitter was great for this – I wasn’t the kind of person to immediately speak up (hello, minority person in tech!) but I could still join the conversation. The limit of 140 characters forced me to be succinct and thoughtful at the same time. I loved that the bar was low; you didn’t have to write an essay.

Twitter was my community. I joked with my colleagues while sitting next to them. I found an amazing and supportive community of other female engineers. I didn’t realise how much I was missing that support, or what a difference it would make to my confidence.

Twitter was my expanded CV. My tech tweets connected me to authors, speakers, and prospective employers. I linked to my projects, my talks, my podcasts; I could retweet others’ praise or feedback to validate my perspective. That track record was enough to open doors later in my career – people offered me jobs, invited me to conferences, asked me to connect them to people, or wanted to discuss collaborations. A lot of that faded as I stopped tweeting, and eventually moved to Amazon in Seattle, but it was hugely meaningful to me at the time.

Twitter was my tech library. Links to great resources, blogs to engineering culture, and particularly other phenomenal women in tech, or stories about how they were being failed and ignored. I curated a collection of those articles as a reference to give to others, when the inevitable “why aren’t there more women in tech?” question came up.

Twitter was a curated stream of consciousness; a place to share things too good to be kept to myself. Some stunning pictures of places I’d visited, or a particularly delicious cake. A one liner that I knew would make a specific person laugh when they read it. A place to explain my weird Australian perspective on British or American things.

I feel a surprising pang thinking about Twitter going away, even though I don’t actively post on it today. There is more than a decade of me catalogued – a lot of my professional growth, and serendipitous connections. Even now, I can’t get some of that back. People have deleted their own tweet histories – I acknowledge that going back 10+ years is a long time to preserve – but also, Twitter, after being horrendously gutted in the last few months, seems on a slow slide towards the garbage heap.

I hope that Twitter survives, but if it doesn’t, I want to acknowledge what it’s meant to me. Thanks for everything.