Developer Podcast 1 - Snooth API

On April 29, the Snooth development team gathered over pizza and beer and discussed all things Snooth. What follows is a lightly edited version of the conversation, which ranges from their thoughts on Snooth, to the intricacies of cataloging wine, to the exciting and challenging realities of working for a startup, to the Snooth API and its implications for developers- and more.

The entire discussion runs about 70 minutes, and the MP3 file is just under 17MB.

Click here to download.

Following is a rough sketch of the topics covered:

Introductions

Mark Angelillo - CTO

Mike Solomon - Creative Director

Troy Conquer - Engineering Intern

Chris - Senior Engineer

What is Snooth?

Discussion about the purpose and potential of Snooth

The Database

Dealing with the intricacies of cataloging wine

Getting wine in XML from merchants all over the world

Strictness vs. leniency- the art of resolution

Fault tolerance with regard to data

Mark talks about the decision to use PostgreSQL over MySQL

Snooth is a parametric search engine (pulls out parameters based on a dictionary)

Key database projects used include Apache Lucene and subproject Solr

The Startup Mentality

What it's like to work for a startup

The Other People at Snooth (beyond the developers)

Discussion about the other people who make up the company, including CEO Philip James, Marketing Director Adam Levin, and Community Manager Gregory Dal Piaz

Meet Troy: The New Guy

The newest member of the Snooth team talks about how he came to Snooth and what excites him

Search

Discussion about the intricacies behind wine search

Using vision technologies to read labels

UPC challenges

The API

Discussion about the API

New API feature provides merchant info based on latitude/longitude- great for Facebook, iPhone, and other platforms that don't provide zip code info

The Facebook App

Designed to showcase the Snooth API

The iPhone App