Today 37Signals made modifications to their Basecamp API which modified the way in which they limit the number if calls that can be made to their APIs. Our application has always been in compliance with their requirements and it was because of our strong logging and monitoring that we noticed the issue right away. Basecamp doesn’t have the best reputation when it comes to announcing changes to their applications that impact other people that are dependent on it, so we put some extra effort into some mechanisms that would alert us of those changes. When they made these changes today we saw the issues in our logs and began investigating as quickly as possible. Once understood the change we implemented a work around that works with new rules, tested it and deployed it to our servers. Our system is back up and running and all Basecamp backup jobs that hit this error will be picked back up by our scheduler and rerun within 24 hours. We also alerted other Basecamp API users of the issue so that they could know about it as well.
When we originally were settling on an architecture for Centripetal Retrieve for Basecamp, these changes were one of the considerations that we took into account. We chose a hosted application model so that we could control the push of fixes as quickly as possible. Had we chosen a desktop application model that our users download and install on their system, our ability to fix issues would be drastically limited and impossible in most cases. The cloud based application model is one that has a lot of benefits for software vendors as well as customers alike.
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