The company blog

The 7digital and Esendex prize for Software Quality

Over the past few years Esendex has been giving guest lectures to computer science students at the University of Nottingham. We’ve been working with the university to highlight the benefits of Agile software development to the undergraduates.

This year Esendex had the opportunity to take part in the group project open day and help select the winners of the best group project. In partnership with 7digital (a leading global open digital content platform), we were also sponsoring and awarding an additional prize for Software Quality. What were we looking for?

• Code quality & architecture
• Testing
• Team organisation
• Knowledge sharing

Esendex developers on quality improvements

Our reliability and service quality are the guiding principles that underpin our promise of “every message matters”. We provide high quality business messaging for a range of customers with differing needs from marketing messages for large multinationals to mission critical messages for small independent operations. Continuing to exceed our SLA’s is always at the driving us to improve but we’ll never compromise on quality just to speed things up.

Recently, it’s not just reliability we’ve been focussing on but also improving the performance of our API and responsiveness of our online messaging application Echo. We’ve listened intently to the feedback you’ve given us and targeted key areas that you’ve identified as most valuable to your workflow.

So…what’s changed?

• Viewing sent messages is over 8 x faster – This means that you can navigate to any of your sent messages instantly
• Looking at individual messages is now over 30 x faster – If you send or receive a large number of messages and spend a lot of time going from message to message you’ll appreciate drilling into the detail faster than ever before
• Viewing your inbox messages is nearly 3 x faster – See your new messages arriving instantly with the improved inbox load times – invaluable if you’re constantly monitoring your inbox

So…how did we do it?

We’ve been investing heavily in our core infrastructure and have been able to take advantage of the benefits this cutting edge technology can bring. We’re also always looking to improve ourselves and the systems we work with. With over 10 years’ experience, we’ve been able to apply our knowledge to address some of the bottlenecks rapid growth would pose to more traditional messaging systems; ensuring these performance improvements are here to stay.

But it doesn’t stop there! We’re already pursuing further enhancements through a combination of strategic improvement and system maintenance programmes.

For more information on what our developers are doing keep an eye on our developer news section on our developer site.

Hack Manchester: Here’s an interview with the winners of our challenge!

On Saturday 27th October, teams from universities, user groups and companies (including a team from Esendex) gathered for a 24 hour coding session at the magnificent MOSI (Museum of Science and Industry).

We offered four shiny Nexus 7 tablets as prizes for the team making the best and most ingenious use of our API.

It was a hard fought contest and we saw many great uses of our API, but there could only be one winner … a team from 7digital – a leading digital media delivery company. They created an online application that allows you to organise football games between you and your friends using text messages.

Here’s what they had to say for themselves…

Esendex: What made you decide to tackle the Esendex challenge?

7digital: It was a combination of the opportunity to create a product, with an interesting API and the prizes. The push service sold the API to us – we knew that we’d be able to have more innovative ideas if we could respond via SMS.

Esendex: What would your elevator pitch for your hack be?

7digital: Manchester is the home of football in the UK – football museum, 64 English football league clubs – most notably aspiring semi-pro clubs and fan owned clubs like FC United. Organising a 5-a-side practise session, or a friendly kickabout with some people after work still isn’t easy – you don’t necessarily see the rest of your usual team during the week and they all prefer to be contacted in different ways. What if you could arrange a match on a website, and the potential players could easily reply via text?

Esendex: You found time to add quite a few features such as reminders, 3D pitch visualisation, man of the match voting and even grab some sleep. Where else would you have taken it with more time?

7digital: A “snooze” for the reminder, a drop down to alter the formation from 4-4-2 on the pitch, the ability to assign teams and also remove the current limitations of only having each mobile number in one game at a time and only one login – authentication always gets built last.

Esendex: What does an event like Hack Manchester mean to you as Developers? And as a company?

7digital: As developers it’s a good social occasion – we often talk about code down the pub so we might as well be doing it too. As a company it was a great showcase for us – it works on all fronts as we have a consumer site, business to business solution and a need to expand our recruitment. Although we might not get enquiries directly, when someone mentions the company name they will associate us with events like this which is a plus point for most developers.

Esendex: Any final thoughts on the challenge or event?

7digital: I’d like to thank the Esendex team for their help during the event – we didn’t need much but they were happy to get involved as soon as we did. The prizes too were an excellent idea – mine has already replaced my phone, Kindle and notebook for my various daily personas.

Take a look at the 7digital football application  – it would be great to hear what you think.