The weather can change in a split second. Your safety depends on timely nowcasts and forecasts that provide understandable information you can use. While we once relied on radio and television for updated information, today, the Internet takes their place. Mobile apps and websites provide real-time information including wind speed and …
RedisLabs Incident
We have been closely monitoring an issue with our servers for the past month. Over the past 30 days, we have been seeing a repeating issue where users were receiving 500 or 429 errors from our servers when making API requests. Upon further investigation, we learned that close to 0.2% of all requests hitting our servers resulted in an error during …
Project Highlight: Explain & Send Screenshots Google Chrome Extension
Like most people who write for the internet, I find myself constantly taking screenshots. I hit the keyboard shortcut on my computer. I open the downloaded image in Preview. I add various arrows, text or shape annotations. I upload the edited image to Imgur or email to share. Done. I didn't realize how much this inefficient process bothered me …
Beyond Scrum: Getting to Continuous Deployment
Scrum is great. Personally, I love it. I loved it as a developer and as a team leader. It brings order to the developer's life and brings a lot of visibility to the lives of project managers all around. It becomes almost the magical solution for development group leaders everywhere. Can’t deliver on time? Use scrum. Need visibility for management? …
Sneak Peek: New API Provider Dashboard
RapidAPI isn’t just a hub of 400,000 developers to find, test and connect to APIs. It’s also a place for API providers to manage, distribute and monetize them. We’ve spent the past three months talking to providers of our 8,000 APIs. During these conversations, we’ve heard useful insights from technical recommendations to big picture strategic …
RapidAPI and Mashape API Marketplace Join Forces
In RapidAPI’s launch blog post back in November 2016, I outlined Rapid’s mission and plan: to connect all the software in the world by helping developers find and consume APIs more easily. Today, Mashape’s API marketplace is merging into RapidAPI to form the world’s largest API hub. Developers can now find, test and connect to over 7,500 APIs in …
TUTORIAL: Verify Addresses with the Streetlayer API
A street address is one type of data you don’t want to get wrong. Whether you’re building an app for mailing, shipping or legal purposes, getting an address right is integral to having your product, you know, delivered. Having an invalid (or incorrectly typed) address could cause delays and annoyance for your app’s users, and cost you a lot of …
Use APIs to Mail Invoices Programmatically [Rails API Tutorial]
Emailed invoices are easy to ignore. But a physical letter? Mailed invoices can earn higher response rates--especially for overdue payments. One brand study reported that the majority (59%) of its customers failed to pay on first billing when emailed and needed additional reminders. Yikes. On the other hand, only 29% of those billed by direct mail …
Only One Woman in Top 100 Stack Overflow Accounts
There's been a lot of talk about women in tech these days. Headlines include both the repugnant and up-lifting. One the ugly side, we've all read about the sexual harassment and mistreatment at famous tech companies. On a more uplifting note, more campaigns and movies are celebrating women's contribution to tech--and inspiring future ladies to take …
Ruby, Go and C# Added to the Marketplace
We've got some exciting news to share! We've added three new languages to the marketplace (and we bet you can guess which ones by our headline). Now, you can export your code snippet in Ruby, Go and C# in addition to Node.JS, Python, PHP, Objective-C, Java and cURL. Read on for why we chose each of these languages or jump …
Build an Alexa Flight Departure Time Skill [TUTORIAL]
We've all been there. You *think* your flight is on time. But sure enough, by the time you get to the airport, you find that it's been delayed for hours. What if you could ask Alexa about your flight status before heading out the door? We built a skill that connects Alexa to the Laminar Flight API so that you can ask Alexa the status of your …
Microsoft Emotion and Spotify “Mood Music” Project [API Smash]
One of coolest things about APIs is seeing what you can build when you smash them together. We built a script that identifies an emotion from an image (with Microsoft's Emotion API), then recommends a musical playlist based on the emotion identified (using Spotify's Public API). We're calling it Mood Music after the team universally vetoed …
HackDavis Teams Shine with Google Translate Skill
This weekend, we were in Davis, California for the Hack Davis hackathon! This hackathon was centered around the idea of social good, and we were definitely feeling the warm and fuzzies. Here are two projects we were pretty impressed by: …
Make Tech More Accessible with These 12 Accessibility APIs
More and more hackathons today embrace themes like social good and accessibility--and we love it. It's pretty amazing to watch developers code projects like SaveURPlanet, an app to measure your carbon footprint, or a robot that acts as a companion to seniors in nursing homes (seriously!). To help more hackers build cool projects like these, …
Israeli Queues: Exploring a Bizarre Data Structure
This morning, I stumbled upon a data structure called an Israeli Queue. As I’m flying to Israel tomorrow, I had to check it out. It turns out that the Israeli queue data structure isn’t just a punny data structure, it’s a useful one too. Israel is notorious for extremely unorganized queues or lines. I can say that--I’m from there. Because …