We've all heard the phrase "the customer is always right," a statement thought to have originated with one of the proprietors of the Marshall Fields department store in the late 19th century. These enterprising businessmen hoped to instill a sense of good customer service in their employees —placing the customer first in the list of competing priorities. The wisdom of this concept has repeatedly proven itself, as others who have adopted it have become the stuff of customer service legend. Nordstrom, Southwest Airlines, Lexus, and a host of others have found tremendous success by putting the customer first.

In the early years of my career, I was a typical technologist—spending the majority of my time narrowly focused on the IT tools and technologies that attracted most of us to this field in the first place. I didn’t give much thought to my customers or what was important to them— until a can of green beans changed my outlook on IT and life.

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The second annual FamilySearch Developer’s conference was held on Wednesday, March 11 at Brigham Young University. Web and application developers from around the world came together to learn about the FamilySearch Application Program Interfaces (APIs) and to see what other developers are doing.

Conference attendees learned about new and updated FamilySearch Application Program Interface from FamilySearch engineers, and best practices from current community developers. Conference sessions were divided into three tracks: FamilySearch API, Third Party Libraries, and Emerging Models and Technology. The “Emerging” track included presentations about the new Catalog API, Timeline API, Rich Client Frameworks, Persistent Identifiers, and a new model for online citations.

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For the last few years, Ruby on Rails has been one of the most talked-about Web application development frameworks. The popularity Rails has enjoyed isn’t without merit—the “coding by convention” idea it helped make popular was beneficial to Web development in many ways.

Coding (or configuration) by convention allows you to concentrate more on what your application is supposed to do rather than how to get it configured properly, which makes development easier and allows you to be more productive. In my own experience, developing an application and getting it into production with Rails was faster than anything I’d used before.

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In today’s tough economic times, we have been challenged by Church leaders to do more with less. Doing more with less does not mean that we need to spend longer hours at the office taking quality time away from our families to get the work done. Instead, it means we need to be smarter in how we work. We need to leverage available resources including the skills and abilities of Church members. The implementation of such a project is much more difficult than it sounds.

Before we could engage members on a project, we had to share several tools and refine processes. Our preparation included building a license agreement, creating a wiki, deploying a source version control tool, defining an issue-tracking program, setting up a “sandbox” server and ensuring data protection. Here are some of the specific tools and processes.

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Question

What is your current position at the Church and what are your responsibilities?

Answer

I am a FamilySearch support engineer for third party developers. Software engineers from around the world are connecting to FamilySearch data through our RESTful Web services. I help companies and engineers learn about
our API and integrate their products with our systems.

More specifically, my responsibilities include:

• Giving presentations at conferences and Webinars
• Writing sample code and documentation
• Recruiting developers to the FamilySearch Developer Network
• Networking with key individuals in genealogy industry
• Troubleshooting API bugs
• Maintaining the FamilySearch Developer Network Web site

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