Awareness of a new API in a business often comes from developers, rather than from the marketing or commercial side of the business. This grass roots traction is an important aspect of an API only business. If developers are becoming customers in that way, there must be a developer sales funnel.
At Wordtracker we run four Rails apps in production. Two of those use background jobs with a Resque implementation. We've recently switched to serving them using Unicorn, with Nginx as a proxy. We've found the restart times on deployment to be far quicker and more graceful, which gives us confidence to roll out new features to our customers as soon as they become available.
The Art of captaincy, ostensibly cricket captaincy, transcends sport to become a treatise on leadership. When reading it, I realised that many aspects and issues he deals with in the book apply directly to leading a team in disciplines outside sport. Restructuring abstract notes made from Brearley's already terse, clinical writing has been a really interesting challenge. I hope that what follows is of interest to software developers and those trying to lead them.