Ask Partner Network

I joined APN in November 2010 to be part of the Firefox Team.

Ask.com, the search had a team devote to the creation of browser toolbar. These toolbars were bundle with some third party software and will help to increase the traffic on Ask.com. This strategy works well and as the number of partners increase, a spin-off has been created: the Ask Partner Network.

The company is based in New York but the whole engineering team is based in Oakland, CA. Today APN has deals with hundreds of partner, which means that hundreds of different toolbar, sharing the same “core” code are use by millions of user. When I joined, 2 browsers were supported : Internet Explorer, from version 6 to version 9 and Firefox 2.0 to 4.0 .

The Firefox Team

In the past, I built a pretty complex Firefox extension ( see my project WeMov ). This kind of skills is pretty rare, especially for fresh graduate. So I got a position in the Firefox team. As you can imagine this team is focus on the work on Firefox. We also work closely with the teams in charge of the configurations of the different toolbar, the build engineers, the installer team, the reporting, server, product development and of course the Internet Explorer team.

Toolbars are compose of a search box and a collection of different buttons or widgets. Some of these widgets are very complex and powerful. The idea is to provide a collection of useful ( … ) tools to the user. I worked on the Facebook widget and on the radio player.

Google chrome

After few months, I have been in charge of the creation of a brand new toolbar for Google Chrome. Until then, APN wasn’t supporting anything in Google Chrome. So the task to the build a toolbar which will support almost the same amount of “public” or “private” functionality, the same amount of partner, the same level of customization, … This project also imply to find a way to install the toolbar with the same bundle that the IE or the FF toolbar is using ( all are installed at the same time ), how to configure the toolbar, the organize the code, how to create a toolbar when Chrome prevent us to do that, how to build it, how to update, how to track user usage, …

Techno

Firefox and Google Chrome use the same stack : HTML, CSS and JavaScript ! I did some ruby and PHP, but it must represent 1% of my coding time compare to JavaScript.

Mots-clés: ask logo, aşk partneri.com, aşk partneri̇̇̇̇̇̇̇̇̇̇̇̇̇̇̇̇̇̇̇̇̇̇̇̇̇̇̇, aşk partneri, www.ask partneri.com