Very proud to let you all know that Twitter has acquired Bagcheck. As co-founder & CPO, I wanted to offer my personal thanks to everyone that was part of our journey, and share some of the technology and design lessons we learned over the past year in the hopes they help other Web teams and entrepreneurs in the future.
If you’re not familiar with Bagcheck, it’s a fun way to create and share lists of the things you are passionate about using on your computer, in your kitchen, for photography, when parenting, and everything in between. From the earliest days of Bagcheck, I was blown away by all the useful, funny, and original bags people consistently made using our site. In the seven months since Bagcheck went live I've marked over 900 such collections as favorites. That means several times a day, someone made something on the site that made me think, smile, or learn something new.
There’s no better feeling for a product designer than to see your work being used in such creative, personal, and helpful ways. So I sincerely want to thank everyone that ever used the site, sent us feedback, or even just checked us out. You all make the Web great.
Also a heartfelt thanks to everyone who worked with us along the way including Bryan Lamkin, Paula Wirth, Thea Lamkin, Ryan Joy, Zach Matthai, Michael Hueschen, Scott Jackson, Bill Scott, Nate Koechley, and our investors: Mike Speiser at Sutter Hill Ventures, Ash Patel at Morado Ventures, Jonathan Katzman, and Peter Fenton.
Sharing What We Learned
While building Bagcheck I started writing up some of the product design decisions we made and Sam Pullara (co-founder and engineering powerhouse) documented the technology and services we used and why. Here’s hoping some of you find it interesting and useful as you tackle your own Web design and development challenges and opportunities.
- The Bagcheck technology stack outlines everything we used to build the site.
- When implementing new features we always started with the command-line version of things first.
- We implemented a lot of real-time user interface elements for instant feedback and updates.
- We strove to bring input and output together in our bag creation form.
- Our new Log In screen was designed to tackle problems with multiple sign-in options.
- We took a fresh look at how sites can manage gender in Web forms.
- Our terms of service (always hard to write) was designed to be fair and readable in plain English.
- A number of services helped us to run company payroll, banking, benefits, and more.
- More articles about our product and technology can be found on the Bagcheck blog.
What’s Next
As our official announcement says the Bagcheck site will continue to be available. So everyone can create and discover the kind of great bags that I’ve come to love. My incredible co-founder Sam Pullara is joining the Twitter engineering team as part of the Bagcheck acquisition so the site is in good hands.
As far as me... only time will tell what’s next. If you’re interested in finding out, you should follow me on Twitter.