Last Wednesday, our new API offi­cially entered pri­vate beta, swing­ing the doors open to early adopters. To pre­pare for the big day, we tech elves were busy get­ting the API to a state where, while still not bug-free, it would be func­tional. And now our adven­tur­ous beta testers are help­ing us iden­tify remain­ing bugs and per­for­mance bottlenecks.

On top of the work to get the inter­face part of our API locked down (view the doc­u­men­ta­tion), we have also been focus­ing on con­vert­ing the appli­ca­tion to use this new API. We are, to use a less-than-appetizing phrase, eat­ing our own dog food. We’ve stan­dard­ized the way data is han­dled by the sys­tem, so that when we build a new fea­ture for the app, we auto­mat­i­cally get an API ver­sion of the fea­ture that we can open to the pub­lic. To those who have used our legacy web ser­vices offer­ing, and have had to work with the lim­ited func­tion­al­ity it pro­vides, you under­stand how impor­tant it is to ensure that all users of Emma, be they via the API or the UI, have access to the most com­plete set of tools we offer. This also means the API calls our cus­tomers have access to are the same calls my cowork­ers and I must develop against. So, if a call doesn’t return cor­rect data, or isn’t per­for­mant, we will feel the headaches just as you do. And noth­ing moti­vates a devel­oper to improve their code faster than mak­ing them actu­ally use it.

I hear some of you ask­ing, “I only use the web inter­face and don’t really care about APIs or build­ing my own Emma at home, so what’s it in for me?” Quite a bit, actu­ally. However, if we’ve done our job right, not much that you’ll see. Not ini­tially, at least. Redesigning the archi­tec­ture has taught us a lot about the chal­lenges of the exist­ing sys­tem, and the new sys­tem avoids those alto­gether. From the way mem­bers and groups are stored to the way emails are sent and tracked, the new sys­tems focuses on sim­plic­ity and exten­si­bil­ity. So, as we start to roll out the new Emma to all of our cus­tomers, you’ll go on using Emma just as you always do, only notic­ing that the app is more respon­sive, and that your mail­ings are deliv­ered even faster. The real fun will hap­pen later as our new sys­tem design will facil­i­tate the addi­tion of new fea­tures, some­thing the cur­rent design makes more dif­fi­cult to accom­plish at the pace we’d like.

So far we’ve only invited about 25 peo­ple into the pri­vate beta, but it is already yield­ing some fan­tas­tic feed­back, uncov­er­ing bugs and giv­ing us a slightly dif­fer­ent point of view on what some of our power users need in order to inte­grate Emma into their own appli­ca­tion. If you’re inter­ested in join­ing the pri­vate beta group and test dri­ving the new API, or the updated Emma built on top of it, please visit the beta tester signup form.