Happy Pi Day!

This year, 2015, is pretty unique in history, at least for nerds.

Pi Day has special significance on 3/14/15 at 9:26:53… but why stop at the seconds?

My friend, Emanuele, challenged me to do something nerdy to commemorate this special moment: to send a happy Pi Day tweet at exactly 3/14/15 9:26:53.590 (we rounded up instead of truncating) with precision within a millisecond.

And I succeeded!

Twitter displays the time a tweet is sent in seconds only, but using its Stream API enables you to see the timestamp with the granularity of a millisecond. Here it is, timestamp_ms is 1426325213590 or 3/14/15 9:26:53.590am UTC:

{

"contributors": null,

"truncated": false,

"text": "Happy 3/14/15 tweeted with millisec precision! #PiDay",

"in_reply_to_status_id": null,

"id": 576675859119017984,

"favorite_count": 0,

"source": "<a href=\"http://placeholder.com\" rel=\"nofollow\">My Best Tweets</a>",

"retweeted": false,

"coordinates": null,

"timestamp_ms": "1426325213590",

...

"lang": "en",

"created_at": "Sat Mar 14 09:26:53 +0000 2015",

"filter_level": "low",

"in_reply_to_status_id_str": null,

"place": null

}

It was no trivial feat — we had to hack tweepy, run tests for a few days, and use multiple servers to achieve this result. We will post more details soon.

For now we just wanted to share our happy Pi Day, with millisecond precision, something unique in history!

Bye!