September 2015 Summaries

The text discusses the challenges and strategies involved in encouraging customers to upgrade from older versions of APIs to newer ones, due to the necessity of making backwards incompatible changes. The company employs a date-based API versioning system, which results in many customers using outdated versions and missing out on new features. Various methods have been tested to encourage upgrades, including email notifications about new features, though these are often ineffective as they can be easily ignored. Documentation only reflects the latest API version, leading to confusion for those on older versions, which prompted the inclusion of conspicuous warnings in the documentation. A more direct approach involves the X-API-Warn header, which notifies users through server logs when they are using deprecated API versions, encouraging them to upgrade. The company is open to suggestions for more effective solutions and invites interested individuals to join their Slack room or consider working with them.

An effective strategy for generating new business leads involves targeting companies similar to current clients, particularly those in the same market or industry. Clearbit's Discovery API facilitates this process by using clustering algorithms to programmatically identify similar companies, which can enhance outbound marketing campaigns. By analyzing a list of existing customer domains, businesses can use tools like Ruby, Python, Node, or REST to search for and compile a list of competitor companies, as demonstrated in the document's example using Salesforce's competitors. This method not only streamlines the lead generation process but also creates a valuable list of potential sales targets, with Clearbit offering a trial Discovery plan that allows users to pull data on 200 companies for free.

The introduction of the new Discovery API by Clearbit aims to streamline the traditionally tedious process of finding new sales leads by allowing users to target companies based on a wide array of parameters with a single API call. This tool, which has been in a closed beta phase for two months, helps automate list building by identifying companies that match specific criteria, such as industry, employee size, and technology usage. It is designed to enhance sales strategies by enabling the identification of similar companies to existing customers and transforming simple company names into fully enriched profiles with firmographic and social data. The API is now publicly available, offering 200 free results to new users, and more information can be found on Clearbit's website.

Clearbit's transition from dokku-alt to CoreOS/Fleet for managing services highlights their evolution in handling service deployments on Amazon's EC2. Initially, dokku-alt served well for small-scale applications but lacked the capability to efficiently manage multiple service instances on a single machine, leading to cumbersome deployments and configuration updates across multiple machines. As service demands increased, Clearbit explored alternatives and opted for Fleet due to its simplicity, flexibility, and the robust reputation of the CoreOS team. Fleet, which operates as a clustered layer over systemd, leverages etcd for distributed configuration management, allowing seamless configuration changes across clusters and enabling multiple service instances through systemd unit file templates. This shift facilitated more efficient management of services, including Docker-based deployments, environment variable handling, and coordination across instances, ultimately leading to the development of the tool "fluster" to streamline configuration and deployment processes. Fluster enhanced their deployment strategy by allowing the simultaneous running of multiple application versions, enabling smoother testing and rollback procedures.