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Dear Lockitron

• Tech Life • 163 words • 1 minutes to read

This is the message I just sent to the Lockitron team. I’m tired and frustrated at how poor the communication has been around schedule delays.

I ordered in October 2012. My original ship date was supposed to be October 2013. The date passed, and there were no updates. Then, April 2014 was the ship date. Still nothing. It’s now July 2014, and it still hasn’t shipped.

I’ve read the blog posts. I know you guys are behind. But how about this — if you’re going to miss the forecasted ship date by a matter of months, why not send me an email to let me know that your website is lying to me?

I don’t want an apology. I want better communication.

I’m this close to canceling my order and going with an automated lock from Schlage that works with the SmartThings service. Give me a reason to continue caring about Lockitron. Please. Here is a wide-open, moment-not-yet-passed opportunity to make things right.

is an engineering manager with over 20 years of experience across software development, site reliability engineering, and security. He is the creator of SimplePie and AWS SDK for PHP, patented multifactor-authentication-as-a-service at WePay, defined much of the CI/CD and SRE disciplines at McGraw-Hill Education, and came up with the idea of “serverless, event-driven, responsive functions in the cloud” while at Amazon Web Services in 2010. Ryan's aptly-named blog, , is where he writes about ideas longer than . Ambivert. Curious. Not a coffee drinker.