But!, I think our engineering team has a secret love affair with the code. There's some pretty fun stuff going on under the covers. I'll give three quick examples..
1) Xobni's data store sits strictly underneath the sidebar code in the stack. It was originally built to support Xobni Analytics, our first product from 2006 that bombed. Fortunately we got to leverage the same data store when creating the Xobni sidebar.
It's very cool. When someone is building software leveraging our backend, say the sidebar, or the Invite Your Friends feature, the code ends up looking like this:
foreach(var mail in new MailIterator()) {
Console.WriteLine(mail.Subject);
}
This code will print 10k subjects per second, from disk! And it's from a key-value store, so it's easy to add new data fields and types.
2) Not only that, but the data store is built to be client agnostic above "layer 1" where we interface with the mail client. So when we wanted to integrate Yahoo Mail all we had to do was build the adapter piece that knew how to speak Yahoo's language, and suddenly the mail floats all the way up the stack and appears in the sidebar right next to Outlook emails. :-)
3) The areas where we display information from Facebook, LinkedIn, etc are all little embedded instances of Internet Explorer. The code for those extensions is all just HTML and Javascript. When the user changes the current email we invoke a specific JS function called updatePerson(), and there's a callback object the JS can use to make HTTP calls and write lines to the log file. This architecture, which was invented by someone smarter than me, allows us to pump these babies out quickly and without much QA risk to the other parts of the program.
It just doesn't get any cooler than this!!!!
(Commercial: if you're a developer and are interested in being part of the team, send your resume to jobs@xobni.com!)
But!, I think our engineering team has a secret love affair with the code. There's some pretty fun stuff going on under the covers. I'll give three quick examples..
1) Xobni's data store sits strictly underneath the sidebar code in the stack. It was originally built to support Xobni Analytics, our first product from 2006 that bombed. Fortunately we got to leverage the same data store when creating the Xobni sidebar.
It's very cool. When someone is building software leveraging our backend, say the sidebar, or the Invite Your Friends feature, the code ends up looking like this:
This code will print 10k subjects per second, from disk! And it's from a key-value store, so it's easy to add new data fields and types.2) Not only that, but the data store is built to be client agnostic above "layer 1" where we interface with the mail client. So when we wanted to integrate Yahoo Mail all we had to do was build the adapter piece that knew how to speak Yahoo's language, and suddenly the mail floats all the way up the stack and appears in the sidebar right next to Outlook emails. :-)
3) The areas where we display information from Facebook, LinkedIn, etc are all little embedded instances of Internet Explorer. The code for those extensions is all just HTML and Javascript. When the user changes the current email we invoke a specific JS function called updatePerson(), and there's a callback object the JS can use to make HTTP calls and write lines to the log file. This architecture, which was invented by someone smarter than me, allows us to pump these babies out quickly and without much QA risk to the other parts of the program.
It just doesn't get any cooler than this!!!!
(Commercial: if you're a developer and are interested in being part of the team, send your resume to jobs@xobni.com!)