I’ve been trying to wrap my head around Common Table Expressions for a while, and all the tutorials I’ve read started out with “simple” examples that were way too advanced for me to follow. Here’s my attempt to write a tutorial that starts as simple as possible.
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You might have read recently that we added merchant auto completion to some parts of our product.
Merchant auto completion on the new expenses dialog
This “simple” addition required some thinking on how people are using our product and what would be the best experience for them.
Like every product change, it is crucial to define how important this feature is and how important the flow supported is. Editing the merchant name of an expense is part of the expense editing flow. While important, this is kind of a secondary flow for us. We are optimizing the usage of our SmartScan and bank import technologies to automate the process of creating expenses in an user account. By using these two technologies in conjunction with Expense Rules, Continue Reading…
You’ve likely already heard about the “Heartbleed” security vulnerability affecting thousands of websites and millions of servers worldwide. I just wanted to share some quick notes here to address any questions you might have about how this affects Expensify: Continue Reading…
We recently highlighted some of the new features you can expect to see with the launch of our new and improved Expensify Beta, but dive deeper and you’ll find that there’s a rhyme and a reason behind many of the design choices we made over the past few months while bringing you expense reports that suck even less. Continue Reading…
Thomas turned me on to a great article from Tim O’Reilly about things he’d do differently had he the chance to do it over. I sent the response below to Thomas, and forwarded a copy to Tim — who encouraged me to share them with the world. So, here we are: Continue Reading…
Just about everyone at Kynetx Impact is looking to spread the good word and encourage the use of APIs. While developing an API can be a viable option, the assumption behind their rampant production is that an API will help the developer reap some sort of great success. Our very own David Barrett has a different story to tell.
Like everyone, we built out our API with the hope that a bunch of people would integrate, but in fact three things happened:
1) Very few people cared to integrate. Instead, the biggest user of the Expensify API is still Expensify.
2) The vast majority of those people who did integrate never did anything with it. They applied, they talked with our engineering team — in a sense, we paid the entire “cost” of integrating with them, even though they never actually ended up launching anything.
3) Those tiny few people who did actually launch something significant never actually produced any value for us. We had high hopes on both sides that joint customers would see all this combined benefit, but in practice very few did.
Hear David speak and find out the full story of the Expensify API at the Kynetx Impact conference – he’ll be speaking on Wednesday at 11 in room 300. Come one, come all!
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