Tag Archives: iContact

Ambient Orb

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A long-time friend of mine started playing with his Ambient Orb a year or so ago. At the time, he explained all sorts of details of how he’d setup a Windows service and .NET providers. I remember thinking, “wow, their API must be pretty complex”.

While in Salt Lake City on vacation, I picked up an orb on sale for $50 and decided to investigate this on my own. Today, I finally got around to looking into the API, and implementing a client. After looking at the ‘API’ I decided on BASH to implement my client.

Spoiler: It’s 2 lines of bash to retrieve our current daily customer count and post it to the ambient orb API. And, before you waste your time both my Orb ID and the database password have been changed.

After combining my ‘service’ with the ever powerful CRON, my Orb now updates every 15 minutes.
[tags]ambient orb, bash, intellicontact[/tags]

launching a beta

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A beta usually sounds like a great idea, but with the difficulties of software development–hitting deadlines, feature drift, and push to release biding time can be challenging. Both agile development and patience paid off in this case. In the preparations for our 4.0 beta, we spent an entire sprint (28 days) dealing with our internal feedback of things that were ‘non-optional’ to fix before our ultimate release. Now, we’re “waiting” a sprint for feedback to roll in.

The challenge comes in distilling the feedback and determining the value of what has been said and suggested, and what hasn’t been said. For example, if everyone talks about the size of the new icons (which are intentionally quite large) does it mean that they thought most everything else was great? Or does it mean they stopped looking after they were scared away by the large icons?

The triage process as will begin next week where we decide what of the feedback gets rolled into the software now, what goes into the product backlog for later, and what gets ‘held’ for further input, suggestion, or interest.

Meanwhile, the development teams have been hard at work playing with buzzwords like RSS and REST.

[tags]intellicontact, beta, rss, rest, scrum[/tags]

php|tek report

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Alan, one of my development managers, and I attended php|tek last week. We had a great time in Orlando and learned a lot about PHP. Lots of great people were at the conference. We met with Rasmus Lerdorf, Scott Johnson, and John Coggeshall to name a few.

We found about half of the talks to be valuable. Each of these contained valuable nuggets of information on PHP internals, web services, and databases.

The other half of the presentations were very disappointing. Alan and I left a number of these presentations feeling that we’d be far more qualified and in some cases have given talks of more interest on these topics.

The most interesting part of the conference was the conversations between Alan and I regarding the architecture of IntelliContact, the way we can start to integrate web services into the application and enable our clients to utilize email marketing to the fullest extent.