It’s with great pleasure that we’re announcing the awesome Gilt API lessons on Codecademy!

Be ready to take your Javascript skills to the next level and learn how to find the latest and most beautiful fashion products with the Gilt API.

Begin to learn our APIs now!

Join Gilt Groupe for the Hearst Fashion Hack, the largest fashion hackathon of the year, where you could win $10,000+ to launch your fashion app!

The Hearst Fashion Hack (#HearstFashionHack) kicks off on Saturday, February 9 at 9:00 a.m. with welcoming introductions by Hearst followed by developers pitching their ideas and forming teams. Coding begins promptly at 1:00 p.m. and submissions are due exactly 24 hours later. On Sunday, prototypes will be presented to the judges. Special consideration will be given to apps that inventively connect readers and editors in real-time.

Tickets are limited. We welcome enthusiasts from all levels of fashion expertise, from corporate juggernauts to prominent young students. We look forward to having you at the Hearst Fashion Hack and helping you build your fashion dreams.

The Gilt Public API is a great tool for developing new ways for people to shop quickly, efficiently, or on new platforms. But developers using the API are also finding unexpected things to do with Gilt data— they’re using it to make games.

So in the spirit of Friday, why not spend a few minutes playing with a couple of games that have been built on top of the Public API?

Gilt Memory was built by Karl Norling, a developer here at Gilt. See how quickly you can find the matching pairs of products, then challenge your friends to beat your score!

The Price is Right on Gilt was built overnight at the NYC Powered by MongoDB Hackathon last weekend. This live multiplayer game lets you and up to 3 other friends play a price-guessing game to see who knows Gilt’s products the best. Developer Yufei Liu built the project using Node.js and MongoDB.

Happy Friday, everyone!

What’s better than spending 24 hours in Manhattan hacking on sweet projects using MongoDB and the Gilt API? Doing it while supporting HackNY, a New York City organization that promotes innovation and entrepreneurship among the city’s up-and-coming students and hackers. And that’s exactly what you can do next weekend, April 27-28, at 10gen’s MongoDB Hackathon. A lot of great people, and great companies, are going to be there, and we’re excited to see you come down and make the next cool project. On Saturday night an esteemed panel of judges will choose winning projects and award all manner of prizes, including iPads, Xbox 360s, and more.

We’ll be at the event to share how to get started with the Public API and answer any questions you may have, give you ideas on what you could build, and maybe give you a sneak peek into what we’re working on for the future of the API, so come find us!

For questions about the event, you can send a tweet to @MongoDB. For questions about the API, get in touch @GiltTech or send an email to api@gilt.com!

There’s been even more work done getting the Gilt API wrapped up in language bindings over the past two weeks and I’m here to present the newest to you in case any of them tickle your fancy.

gilt_api_php is a PHP client written by Gilt Tech member Dan Revel. This library has tests and a demo app to get you started on downloading and featuring sales and products in no time.

Gilt-Java, by Gilt Tech’s very own Nitin Dhar, is of course a Java library for the Public API. Nitin is working on some Android compatibility so mobile app developers don’t need to remain glued to our iOS bindings!

gilt-python is a brand new Python library brewed here at Gilt by engineer Andrew Ellerton. If you’re working in Python, give it a try and see how you like it!

We’re hard at work on compiling a permanent directory of client libraries like the ones we’ve featured on this blog and some of the applications people have built already. Email us soon if you have something you want to see included!

It’s been great to hear from developers over the past two weeks about their plans for the Gilt Public API, and we can only imagine what’s in the works out there that we haven’t heard about yet! Meanwhile, back at Gilt HQ, we’re hard at work on adding more to the API— more data and more ways of accessing what you want in the easiest way possible.

In the meantime, though, I’m happy to announce that we’ve finally got everything in place to enable you to participate in the affiliate marketing program. By enrolling in this program and adding a single parameter to all the requests you pass in, you can earn a competitive 6% commission on all sales from referred customers. When you consider that the luxury items on Gilt lead to average total order values of $150, that adds up pretty quickly.

All the information you need to get started has been added to the Gilt Developer Portal; the technical information is on the main documentation page and information about how to sign up for the affiliate program is available on our FAQ. What are you waiting for?

7 days ago, we launched our Public API and the accompanying Developer Portal. We’ve received a lot of great feedback, updated the Portal a bit to better give you the information you need, and talked to a lot of developers with some really neat ideas for ways to use the API. Now’s a great time to get started on your own application!

Today I’m here to share some of the hard work that people have been doing, both here at Gilt and in the developer community at large, to make the API more accessible to developers of specific languages. We now have the first API language bindings available for Javascript, Ruby, Objective-C, Scala, and Python!

There’s more to come; I’ll make sure to update here when we have support for more languages or other libraries that might tickle your fancy. Until then, this should be enough to get you started, right?

Javascript

Developed by Chris Young-Zawada here at Gilt, these Javascript language bindings are available as a jQuery-based implementation, so all you have to do is drop in a recent version of jQuery and this .js file and you’re off to the races!

Ruby

gem install kin is all you need to get started with using the Gilt API in Ruby. Developer Vivek Bhagwat put together this rubygem to let Ruby developers worldwide have access to Gilt’s great flash sales in their applications. Thanks, Vivek!

Objective-C

iOS development is kind of a big deal right now, and what better way to dip your toes in the water or extend the reach of your mobile app empire than to use this Gilt API iOS client library to integrate Gilt sales data into an app for iPhone, iPod Touch and/or iPad? (That’s a rhetorical question. This is the ultimate way to do those things.) The SDK was put together by a crack team of Gilt mobile developers: Louis Vera and Adam Kaplan.

Scala

Recently among my friends and, it seems, in the developer community at large, what started as a whisper (“Scala is pretty sweet”) has turned into a roar (“DEPLOY ALL THE SCALA”). If you’re one of the converts, I’m happy to tell you that developers Moses Nakamura and Vivek Bhagwat have prepared a fully-tested, simple to use library called Aurum that give you access to the Gilt API. Moses and Vivek win the prize for being the first client library developed outside of Gilt— it was up and ready for use fewer than 48 hours after the launch of the API!

Python

Not content to rest after that, Moses put together a simple Python wrapper for the Gilt API as well. It’s currently the slimmest of the client libraries highlighted here today, clocking in at just over 100 lines of code, but supports digging through all of the sales and product information that you need to explore our curated sales and do all kinds of fun stuff with them. Good luck, Pythonistas!

I’m really excited to tell you that we’ve launched our Public API today, providing programmatic access to a constantly-updating collection of flash sales full of the usual kind of awesome stuff we offer on Gilt’s stores.

We held an internal hackathon two weeks ago and saw some really interesting projects come out of just a day’s work and the brainpower of one room of (admittedly super-smart and obviously very handsome) Gilt engineers, but I can only imagine where things can go now that we’ve got the whole developer community armed and ready.

If you’re not like me and don’t just get pumped up whenever you see a new API you can curl, maybe I can sweeten the deal a bit— we’re in the process of putting the finishing touches on an affiliate marketing program, meaning that you can earn a cut of any money we make when your app leads to a purchase on Gilt. You can start building your project now and we’ll have the details on how to sign up and integrate this into your work soon.

The Gilt Developer Portal is your go-to site to read up on how to use our API and apply for API keys for your applications. We’ll be adding more information to that site regularly as we add new features and content to the Public API. Exposing sales and products is just a first step; we’ve got a lot of exciting ideas in the works, so stay tuned!