The system design

Having a basic design sketched out is often useful, especially in distributed systems where many components will be communicating with each other in different ways. We don't want to spend too long on this stage because our design is likely to evolve as we get stuck into the details, but we will look at a high-level outline so that we can discuss the constituents and how they fit together:

The preceding diagram shows the basic overview of the system we are going to build:

• Twitter is the social media network we all know and love.
• Twitter's streaming API allows long-running connections where tweet data is streamed as quickly as possible.
• twittervotes is a program we will write that pulls the relevant tweet data via the Twitter API, decides what is being voted for (rather, which options are mentioned in the tweet body), and then pushes the vote into NSQ.
• NSQ is an open source, real-time distributed messaging platform designed to operate at scale, built and maintained...