Bringing Legacy Systems Into The Modern World
At Belly, we’re making businesses personal for every single merchant – no matter what. So here was a challenge: connect a 20 year old legacy POS system developed by a third party and running on an outdated operating system to the Belly Merchant app on iPad. This is what we were working with:
The devices needed to not only integrate but also establish a bi-directional communication channel, so that the iPad functionality would remain the way our Members have come to know and love. Continue…The Tools We Use to Design
Before We Open Our Laptops
Today, the availability of digital design software is vast. We have so many choices when it’s time to get to work. Like most designers, we at Belly love trying beta releases of the newest, super-slick software, but we also already know what works well for us now. Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter what piece of software we use, as long as it gets the job done. The software itself is not as important as the ideas and processes that lead to the design solution.
With that being said, here is a quick overview of the current tools we are using to design at Belly.
Building Belly’s Merchant Mobile App with React Native
The Belly mobile applications allow users to track their reward programs and easily check into their favorite businesses. We wanted to enable our merchant customers to manage their loyalty programs, send and monitor marketing campaigns, and track redemptions using the same application. Resource constraints on the team exposed an opportunity for us to explore building the app with React Native or Ionic and embedding it within our existing consumer application.
Q&A: Flori
What was it that led you to a career in Computer Engineering?
It actually started pretty late for me. I was working as a restructuring consultant in the financial consulting industry. After doing that for a little over a year, I realized that I just wasn’t feeling passionate or excited about the work that I was doing. I was working with companies that were financially distressed, so it was a very high stress environment with a lot of travel. I rarely felt a connection with the projects I was working on since my clients and objectives were constantly changing. I wanted to be a part of building something long term. Continue…
Email Reputation Management – Part Two
This is the second of a two part post, so if you aren’t familar with how email delivery works or the importance of your reputation as an email sender, be sure to check out part one before reading on. Here we’ll dive deeper into the topic of email reputation management, covering some concrete steps you can take to more effectively manage your email sending reputation.
Email Reputation Management – Part One
As application developers one of our primary methods of communication with our users is via email. As we all know, our emails contain highly valuable and important content to our users.
This includes things like account setup notifications, password reset instructions, marketing newsletters, and others. Our product here at Belly is no exception to this rule. Many of the features we’ve rolled out during the past year revolve around sending various types of email messages to our merchant and/or member users. At Belly this is additionally complex because we also send a healthy number of emails on behalf of our merchants (e.g. announcements, promotions, event invitations, etc). In light of this, it’s important to have confidence that emails sent from your system are reliably reaching the intended recipient.