The development team has been pretty excited these days. First, we’re working on a pretty cool feature that I shan’t divulge yet for fear that Mike and Cody revoke my blogging privileges. Second, we’re going to Google IO this year. This is a good segue for me to explain a little bit about what’s behind the scenes when you log into BookedIN. Fear not, I’ll keep the tech talk to a minimum.

When you need an application platform that scales seamlessly with built-in caching capabilities and a clean MVP architecture…
Just kidding.

If you scroll way to the bottom of our home page, you will see the following:

Built on Google technologies.
We are proud to say that the BookedIN system is built using the latest in Google technologies including Google Web Toolkit and Google App Engine. Why did we choose Google? Simple. Their tools are powerful, flexible and fast. The same things we wanted to give you in an online scheduling system.

Although this is a simplified version of why we went with Google as the basis for BookedIN, it’s an accurate summary. Google technologies have been instrumental in allowing us to focus on what’s important: building great features.

So naturally, the development team jumped at the chance of going to Google’s annual developer conference. This is for a few reasons. First, being a remote team, I’m personally looking forward to spending some face time with everyone in the same room. Second, this is a chance for us to interact with some wicked smart people. I plan to pick a few brains for ways of improving how we’ve built BookedIN. Finally, going to a conference once in a while is a nice way to boost the energy and creativity levels. I often come back from them with my head swimming with ideas and possibilities on how to improve the software I’m working on. That can only be a good thing for our customers.

To add to our excitement, we’re going to have a booth at the developer’s sandbox, a special area of the conference reserved for companies that use Google technologies. Here we’ll get to showcase BookedIN to other developers and show off what we’ve done. That may sound self-gratifying but if you know any software developers at all, then you know how much we love to share what we’re working on with our peers.

That’s about as technical as I plan to get for some time but I thought it would be nice to let you in on our enthusiasm.

If you’ve ever installed Microsoft Office, you’ve probably asked yourself this question; Why does Word need to know my initials? And if I leave them out, will it think I’m up to something?

It’s questions like that which inspired us to keep things simple at BookedIN. We didn’t want you to see a bunch of options and check boxes when you logged in. We didn’t want to ask you a bunch of unnecessary questions. Basically, we didn’t want to “Microsoft” our application.

Most software is too complicated. And here’s why: it’s easier to make software complicated than it is to make it simple. It’s easy to throw a new screen into your application and give people instructions on how to turn it off if they don’t want to. Or wait until your customers complain and then remove it.

It’s much harder to ask the question “how and why would someone use this feature?” before building it. Harder because it leads to even more difficult ones like “what goal am I trying to accomplish?” and “how do I know I’ve succeeded?” and “what happens if something goes wrong?”

At BookedIN, one of the underlying tenets of any new feature is simplicity. That’s why we ask those questions. We think software should stay out of your way.

Consider the Office dialog I mentioned above. See what kind of results you get when you Google “Please enter your full name and initials below” and tell me if someone asked “why?” before adding it in.