My X/Twitter Birthday: I’m A Twitter Teenager

My X/Twitter Birthday: I’m A Twitter Teenager

A journal of 4,748 days of my working life

They say that a year is a long time in politics. Well, on the Internet, a year can also be such a short time, especially in how quickly it has advanced. I am reminded of this, with my 13th birthday for my Twitter feed, as I first started “tweeting” on the 15th of December 2010 [here]:

You can see they all look a little basic, and the engagement was zero! But, it, at least, is a little journal of my working life through the years, and you can see my throughts at the time, and what I was doing. For this, it is great to see that Apple have released a Journal App, and which will automatically record what you were doing on given days. I’ve started mine with a rather boring OpenSSL addition:

Intially, my tweeting rate was fairly slow (about one message every five days), but managed to get a forward on 18 Jan 2011 [here]:

And it took nearly two years for my first graphic to appear [here]:

And, smart phone cameras have advanced a great deal, as you can see from this 2013 tweet [here]:

and when we breathed life into our new vSoC Cloud [here]:

For my profile — up to this morning — I’ve posted 64,713 tweets over 4,748 days, and which puts me at an average of 13.6 tweets per day. Overall, I’m a “C+”, with around 60 tweets a week at the current time — which would fit my overall average:

A peak in followers happened around 28 Dec 2020:

And it related to the time I got 1,000,000 views with [here]:

and it even appeared on the BBC site [here]:

Overall, it’s around 7.4GB of data and organised in a way that leaves a trail of thoughts and events, and a timeline of memories [here]:

Oh, and that time with Snowden [here]:

Or that time we won the cipher cracking challenge [here]:

And lauched The Cyber Academy [here]:

And in that time we travelled over Scotland to present on IoT and cybersecurity [here]:

The pride is seeing our spin-outs evolving into the world [here]:

And then seeing them getting aquired [here]:

And to see the transformation of our graduates into world leaders [here]:

and [here]:

And [here]:

And then, in 2022, the magic happened again [here]:

And my love of the city has never wained [here]:

A few years ago, we lost David Benyon [here]:

and, at the time, I questioned whether social media should still record his tweets and for LinkedIn to be posting his anniversaries. But, someone replied that it was David's legacy to still be remembered and celebrated, and which I agree with now. Overall, we leave digital footprints in virtually everything we do in our lives, and this will only increase as the Internet progresses.

Well, I need to get back to my work … so I’ll end there. I do love X/Twitter, and I read much of the news from there. What I have on the platform is an archive of 4,748 days of my working life. They have mostly been “ups” (the love of my city, our amazing students, the creation of four amazing spin-out companies, and my love of cryptography/ cybersecurity), and just a few “downs” (Brexit, poor cybersecurity, and the loss of EU citizenship).