Wow, what a week it has been here at Constant Contact. Monday was your pretty typical first day- who we are, what we do, expectations, and paperwork (lots of it). But in full-blown trial by fire fashion, I found myself representing Constant Contact at Secure360 on Tuesday, and flying to Chicago for php[tek] Wednesday! So [...]
What LEGO Blocks Teach Us About REST API Testing
May 7, 2013 By Leave a Comment
My son loves LEGO® blocks. He is continually fascinated about the ways he can use and reuse various LEGO blocks to build different kinds of towers and other edifices. He also likes to use the same larger LEGO blocks as a foundation for a multitude of different towers. Why should REST API testing be any [...]
Automatic Cluster Membership with Puppet
May 2, 2013 By Leave a Comment
Overview Recently, I was tasked with setting up a HA solution for our monitoring servers. I decided to use Linux HA and set up an active/passive cluster, one per environment. We use Puppet for configuring and deploying our services, so a Puppet module that would bootstrap, install, and configure multiple, different Linux HA clusters was needed. [...]
Constant Contact API Webinar and Live Q&A Session
April 26, 2013 By Leave a Comment
As many of you know, we just released an extensive update to the Constant Contact API and developer portal. Join us to learn what’s new and how our app partner program can help you reach success with your integration. David Berard, product manager, API, and Kevin O’Brien, senior director, app partner program, will share the highlights [...]
The Next Generation of Small Business Software Developers Won’t Need a Sales Team
April 18, 2013 By Leave a Comment
The following is a guest post from Alan Wells, co-founder and product designer at Glyder, a 500 Startups-backed company that gives small businesses the content and metrics they need to be effective online marketers. He’s been designing mobile and social software since 2007, including roles at Affinity Labs (acquired by Monster.com), Zynga, and a design [...]
Using Client Technologies on the Server
April 18, 2013 By Leave a Comment
Whether a type of technology belongs on the front end or the back end is generally considered to be a clear choice: e.g., HTML on the client, SQL on the server; CSS on the front end, C++ on the back. In contrast to some of these patterns, however, we’ve been finding some useful applications of [...]
Predictability in an Agile World
April 11, 2013 By Leave a Comment
As agile methodologies have grown and evolved, one common challenge encountered is how to give the proper visibility and establish a degree of confidence regarding predictability. There are many schools of thought tailored to different agile methods, but one observation I have made is most organizations adopt a flavor or mashup of a methodology. A [...]
Announcing the New Constant Contact V2 API, Developer Portal, and Developer Acceleration Tools
April 2, 2013 By Leave a Comment
Over the past year, we’ve mentioned a few times that we are working on a new version of our API. It’s been quite a journey since we launched our original public REST API in 2008. Since then, expectations have changed, technologies have advanced, and our developer community has been vocal about what they want. They’ve [...]
The Small Business Web Summit – Lots of Talk on App Stores…
March 19, 2013 By Leave a Comment
If there were still any doubt that open APIs and integrated business apps were going to reach small businesses, then I’d say they are now put to rest. More than 150 business and technology leaders in the SMB space descended on the eBay campus last month for the Small Business Web Summit 2013, in what [...]