Best Buy Remix Developer Blog

Last week was really interesting, and also really tiring. I spent it in San Francisco, with a day-trip to San Diego, in a whirlwind of meetings spanning my day job, Remix and some other things that are really fascinating.

For example, did you know that Sun has a platform for app development called Zembly? I did not, until they demoed it in our meeting on Wednesday morning. Neat stuff, and we're going to talk to them about getting Remix into the set of embedded APIs.

But what's really on my mind right now is the public beta. We're sort of in-between right now -- the portal is in public beta, with anyone able to self-provision for access, and registration isn't required to see the documentation. But the API is in private beta, with us manually activating keys. We're not really concerned about flooding the servers, since our testing has showed that we handle traffic quite well, and we can add new server slices as needed to support demand. The real concern is that there are some things we need to get in order for us to be able to call it a true public beta program.

Since this is an open API, I figured I'd be open about what we're working on and get feedback on it.

First is the API itself. We need the ability for you as a developer to hit a specific version. We need a release methodology for versions documented. We need standards for versioning documented. And we need to decide how many versions back we are going to support.

We also need to do some process cleanup -- the refresh is currently daily and can be faster, and the primary catalog refresh needs to move 12 hours earlier. You know, little stuff.

Second is the portal. We talked with Mashery about possibly using Google Groups in addition to the portal to provide additional functionality. Pivotal Labs suggested using GetSatisfaction, which is interesting, although I think the potential for people to come into the Remix area and complain about Best Buy might make it hard to focus. Please note that I'm not saying those complaints aren't valid, I'm just saying they'd be off-topic for the API.

Third, and tied to the portal, is staffing. We're incredibly light right now -- just two people full-time on Remix, with others (like me) taking time from other jobs to help out. We've identified a need for a community manager, someone who can help us manage the portal and ensure that we're actively listening to our user community, but we don't have a candidate identified.

Once we get through these three things, I believe we'll be ready for public beta. We won't be done, of course, but that's not a problem. I'm used to that. :)

If you have comments or feedback, please let me know @bestbuy.com -- I'm kevin.matheny there.