Wearing our Developers' Shoes
I set a quarterly goal to write an application in my 20% time that uses
publicly available Google APIs. While some would call this scenario testing, I refer to it as
"method user experience design" (think method acting). The process can often be painful, but I
do it in the hope that it will make me a better designer. It puts me in the shoes of our
customers who build products on top of Google's products. I read the same documentation,
search the web for the same solutions, write code against the same APIs, and deploy to the
same infrastructure. From this exercise come product improvements and empathy. I also enjoy
attempting to make something useful, sketching with Python and JavaScript (the charcoal and
conte crayon of web development), and proving that 20% time is alive and well.
When it came time to pick last quarter's application, I wanted to work with
YouTube's APIs for two reasons: I have a background in video (as a filmmaker and as a software
designer) and I wanted to share family videos with my oldest brother, who is hard of hearing
and learning disabled. Fast forward a few months later and I had
CaptionTube, an application for creating
captions for YouTube videos. CaptionTube has launched on
TestTube and Hiroto has written a
post about it on the YouTube
blog.
In addition to the YouTube
Data and
Player
APIs, the application is hosted on
Google
App Engine and uses the Datastore, Google Accounts, Mail, and URLFetch
Python APIs. I used
several open source software projects to create it:
Django and
jQuery, and
app-engine-patch. If you are
attending
Google I/O in May and
would like to ask me questions about my experience or discuss your experience using Google's
developer's products, please look for me in the developer sandbox or office hour
sessions.
By John Skidgel, App Engine Team
