Me, myself and XWS
I recently started in the XWS team as a Software Engineer and, since most of you have already seen the beautiful "coming soon" page, I'd like to provide you with an outline of our team and a few insights into what we're building. by Jan Ahrens
First things first: XWS is not another acronym for an XML-ish thing like XSL or XUL; it stands for XING Web Services. We’re the team that’s currently building the XING API to be rolled out in the near future.
Our RESTless team
My team consists of ten awesome people who work in various roles. Our Product Owner maintains an overview of the big picture. There are four Software Engineers (including myself) who think in code most of the time. Our bug hunter, or “Quality Assurance Manager”, makes sure that our API is rock solid. An Agile Project Manager helps us all to excel by taking care of our development process.
The team was recently expanded with new hires who mainly focus on the interaction and visual design for our upcoming developer portal. A frontend engineer has joined us with the aim of making the portal look awesome in every browser.
Yes we Kanban!
We are all into Kanban and our daily work includes a high number of tasks. The huge Kanban wall in our team space reflects the ongoing tasks and keeps us moving forward.
In urgent cases, we handle the card in a “double rocket” lane (you may know it as an expedited lane) that overrules every other ticket in the normal lane. By using that approach we can move critical tasks out of the lane faster, but don’t worry, it doesn’t occur that often. Other than that we always have a continuous flow of cards aimed at building the API’s developer portal. We’re all really looking forward to releasing it.
A look under the hood
Last, but not least, I want to give you a sneak peek into the technologies we offer. This will probably come as no surprise as we designed our API using best practices and also follow the principle of least surprise. It supports XML, but we love JSON and encourage everyone to use it. The API is build around a REST-style interaction model. We implemented OAuth, so you will need a consumer key to obtain access tokens for your application’s users.
We hope you’re as excited as we are about the upcoming release. If you haven’t registered yet, have a look at our “coming soon” page where you can request to be notified once things are up and running. Our Twitter account is another good way of getting the latest about our progress. So stay tuned!
About the Author
Jan Ahrens works as a Software Engineer at XING. Most of the time you see a Vim window on his screen. He's secretly in love with Haskell and on his way to become a Foosball champion. XING Profile »