Infographic of the Day: Twitter's Explosive Growth, Behind the Scenes

A mesmerizing look at the programming that's gone into creating Twitter.

Setting up Twitter was just a matter of building the thing and then watching it explode, right? Not even close: To make sure the operation can handle an exponentially growing user base, the code has to constantly revised and improved.

To illustrate that, Ben Sandofsky, an engineer at Twitter, ran the site's code through Code Swarm, a data viz program that tracks programming changes (a little bit like tracking redline...