"With the eagerly anticipated swap to Amazon Web Services (AWS) happening this month, it's been a busy time for the tech team; even so, our clients still saw improvements being rolled out. Now hold on tight and do not adjust your sets; AWS here we come!" - Jonny Anderson
It was the softest of launches. Starting with a single friendly client and working our way up, we have rolled out the new look Regular Email template. This includes the new Machine Learning recommendations, automatically generated Spotlight articles and a much improved design.
This means that the first version of manage-comms is now officially delivered to all clients. Watch this space for what is coming in the next version. If you have ideas, suggestions or requests from clients, then make sure you feed them into ProdPad.
Recommendations for All
Smart, personalised recommendations have been part of the Toolkit homepage for a while but incorporating this machine learning tech into our regular-email proved to be a surprisingly difficult.
The problem was one of scale; to send each email with its own user-personalised recommendations meant producing 390,000 recommendations in one go. It took a few attempts but we eventually built something robust enough, and fast enough, to do the job without breaking the Internet.
With this incremental improvement, we are finally bringing machine learning to the masses.
All Types of Content
You know what a carousel is? They normally sit at the top of pages and flick annoyingly between pictures. It seems like such a good idea but research shows they just don't work. We junked ours a while back in favour of our Spotlight-On feature that simply presents curated content.
The problem? We could only shine our spotlight on articles! We fixed that limitation and now we can shine our Spotlight On any content we like. We hope it's one of those small evolutionary improvements that has a positive butterfly effect.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides hosting, email and other services needed to make our software available to our clients. It is more robust, cheaper and far more convenient than buying or leasing our own hardware.
If it works you shouldn't notice anything at all. It certainly won't affect your normal work. Hopefully, in the longer term, you will notice better stability and improved turn-around times.
Just keep your eyes open for any issues. The Tech & Devops teams will be on their toes but
if you spot something bad then do not be afraid to report it in the tech-sos channel and, if you
need an instant response, day or night, do the right thing and send out an SOS (see Jargon Buster below)
It has already started. In the last few weeks clients have been informed and have been testing; we have been swapping components back and forth; we have been testing and testing again; but the large bakelite switch is going to be thrown on the evening of Friday March 15th. That is the big day.
Of course it will. You have nothing to worry about.
Sometimes things go wrong at just the wrong time. With clients across every time-zone, what do you do if something bad happens when all us over-worked techs are in our beds dreaming of electric sheep?
We know it's important and you want to scream; pull the alarm-cord; sound the emergency-klaxon; send up a distress-flare; trigger the bat signal - anything to get a tech out of their cosy bed!
Here is how you do it:
tech-sos slack channel
@bitbot sos
Behind the scenes bitbot will send an SMS
text message to a designated first-responder, if
they do not answer bitbot will move onto
the next person in the list, and so on, until a lazy, good-for-nothing tech wakes up and gives you
the support you deserve.
Go on, don't be shy - try it out, see if it works. For the next week we have asked our first-line responders to be ready for people testing this. They want you to feel confident it will work when it really matters.
This is what it looks like in action:
