IT Update
What's going on at SFE IT? Here's a quick update to find out!
Today we have a guest post from our own Dave Stillman (he of product post video fame). Take it away, Dave!
Why hello, it's Dave from IT here. As you may know, SparkFun tries to keep a lot of stuff in-house. This ranges from engineering to production, and from design down to my job in IT. Here in IT we not only keep the web site up and running (most of the time...) but also write the software that runs SparkFun as a business. From the time an order is placed to when your red box goes out the door, there is a pretty complex system in place to keep track of orders, product builds, purchasing and everything else that keep us running.
Most of the stuff we in IT make is only visible to people who work here, but now that it's been a while since the Day That Shall Not Be Mentioned In IT's Presence, we thought it would be a good time to show you some of the stuff we've been working on that might affect you!
UPS
The biggest change over the past couple months is most certainly the addition of UPS. A few weeks ago we silently released the option to choose UPS as a shipping option when you check out. It's the same red box you know and love, but now delivered by a person wearing brown! Hopefully this new offering will give you the best shipping options, including more speedy deliveries as well as improved international options.
Wish Lists
Caution: Nerd Talk Ahead:
We've now got nearly 15,000 Wish Lists after rolling them out earlier this year. We've made a lot of subtle improvements based on your feedback, and one of the features we're playing with is Embeddable Wish Lists. Try throwing ".js" on the end of your wish list URL and putting it in a script tag on your web site! We'll be putting some polish on this feature and will have links and sample code on your Wish List page soon.
Lots of Tweaks
The keenest SparkFun customer might have noticed that we're always shuffling bits around the web site. Besides adding more Easter Eggs, we've been also adding more options for sorting products based on things like popularity, recent sales and even more to come. We're trying to make it easier for you to find exactly what it is you're looking for! We've also put more work into making the shopping experience as simple and straightforward as possible.
There's plenty more coming soon! I'm most excited to be working on the [REDACTED] that's launching in a few months, and the [REDACTED] that Ben's been putting the polish on looks really slick and I know you're going to love it.
We're working hard behind the scenes to keep SparkFun running. Thanks for reading, and I hope you take your suggestions to our public IRC channel where one of us is usually idling. We'd love to hear from you!
