June 2015 Summaries

A new data attribute, technology tags, has been introduced for the Company API, which identifies the technology stack and products a company uses, aiding in understanding whether new signups already utilize cloud technology. This feature allows for more targeted messaging, such as identifying if a company uses specific prebuilt integrations like Salesforce. For instance, the technology tags for segment.com reveal their use of Mailgun, Google Apps, and EC2 hosting. Technology detection is accomplished by a large-scale web crawler that identifies specific scripts, HTML, and DNS entries, covering most analytics, marketing, and email services with data refreshed every 30 days. The system is continually updated, and suggestions for additional technologies are welcomed.

The text discusses the challenges and solutions for implementing API versioning at the code level, with a specific focus on practices at Clearbit using Ruby and Sinatra. It highlights the complexity often involved, such as conditional statements cluttering the codebase, and proposes a date-based versioning system that uses the date of the first API call as a version reference, allowing clients to upgrade via account settings. For route-based changes, new routes are created and mounted in reverse chronological order, facilitating straightforward testing and easy removal of deprecated versions. Additionally, the concept of a 'serializer' is used to manage changes to data returned by the API, with major changes requiring new resources and minor changes handled by conditional logic. The approach aims to balance simplicity with the DRY principle, and the author invites feedback on best practices, noting that the system is still evolving.

Clearbit has introduced several enhancements to its APIs, driven by user feedback, including the addition of versioning, which allows users to specify an API version through a header, enhancing flexibility in managing API updates. The company has also streamlined its combined lookup API by introducing a single webhook that returns both person and company information, replacing the previous dual webhook system, and has added domain alias support to its Company API, enabling proper redirection and identification of all domains associated with a company. Additionally, a new type attribute has been added to Company lookups, which categorizes companies into types like private, public, nonprofit, government, education, and personal, aiding in lead partitioning for targeted markets. To bolster security, Clearbit now includes a X-Request-Signature header in webhook requests to verify authenticity using HMAC, ensuring that webhooks are genuinely from Clearbit, with automatic signature verification available in the Ruby API. All these updates are a direct response to customer requests, emphasizing Clearbit's commitment to continuous improvement based on user needs.