The “Break it Down” Blog

How cool could a Friday get? I’ll tell you how cool… you get an email in your inbox saying “Congratulations, you won”… an iPhone.

So a few months ago SmugMug, awesome photo sharing site, decided to hold a contest to promote usage of their extended and enhanced developer API. I had been working pretty heavily for a while on my own Java-based API for a previous version of their API. When I saw the contest was in action, I decided to extend my own Java API to provide access to their enhanced API as well as the previous version.

Over the months I pounded away at it, with a lot of core feedback coming from Anton Spaans (author of SmugFig) and my buddy David Parry, who had been making revisions to the SmugMug API and refining it over the months really tightening it up nicely without so much as a single complaint the entire time and a good portion of the work done in his off time when we could sync up.

It seems after the dust settled Don (CEO of SmugMug) announced the winners of the contest and the kallasoft SmugMug Java API was on the list! One of the nice twists to this story is that there was suppose to only be 1 winner, but because the SmugMug crew was swamped with work and had to push out the announcement longer than intended, they decided to announce 4 winners instead of 1… pretty awesome compensation for simply extending the announcement if you ask me.

Anyway, after doing a single, double then triple take, and asking for an official confirmation just so I made sure I didn’t accidentally mis-read the post, I promptly fell backwards out of my chair. I was never gunning for the iPhone award and just wanted to make a solid API that folks could build on… if anything I thought someone would use the API to build a cool app for the contest… but to get the news and recognition for the work was a really really nice surprise today.

For folks that use SmugMug and want an actual end-user-app to use with their account, the contest thread is chalk full of some really cool applications that were created for the contest. I’m sure you can find a cool app in there to try out (like syncing your files locally and remotely).

Anyway, wanted to send a Thank You to the SmugMug team, Don & David, and also to Anton. You guys are all great.