Stories
I've long been searching for a term to describe a concept that I see across the API space, where API providers, API consumers, and API service providers take more from the space, than they give back. This co...
I used to work in the music industry back in the 90s, and sometimes the tech sector reminds me of this time hustling in the music space. There are definitely a lot of things that are different, but the business of the tech space, often reminds me of some of the business currents that exist in the music industry.
When you ...
I have had numerous startup ideas, half to full baked over my 25 year career, with just two I consider to be a success. All of them taught me massive lessons about myself, business, and building relationships with other people. All of this experience has gone into my invention of the API Evangelist persona, and there some hard learned lessons tha...
Historically, I have a "working" Amazon EC2 micro instance, that is my playground for writing code. This is where I begin all my coding adventures, and often is where most of them end up living forever. I have a lot of great work here, that I easily forget about, shortly after pushing the ideas out of my head, and on to the server via my IDE. ...
When you see me at conferences, you might notice that I am often very engaged while at the event. However after the event lets out, and everyone heads off to the bar or pub, you may not find me tagging along anymore. You see, I am finding it increasingly hard to be present, because of one thing--my hearing.
You may not know this, but I ...
For a brief moment in the API space, we all had swagger. When it all began, we were working towards interoperability in a digital world where none of us actually wanted to work together, after being burnt SOA bad before. We all pretended to be working together, but in reality we were only operating on just a handful of available VE...
When I craft a story for any of my blogs, I use a single content management system that I custom built on top of my blog API. I'm always looking to make it more valuable to my readers by providing the relevant links, but also make it more discover-able, and link-able within my content management and c...
I get a lot of requests from individuals and companies who want to "partner" with me, with many meanings to what this actually means. As a one person operation I have to be very careful who I engage with, because it is very easy for large organizations, with more resources to drown me in talk, meetings, emails, and other alternatives to actua...
I used to be more immersed in the world of top tech blogs, when my partner in crime @AudreyWatters worked at ReadWrite, O'Reilly, and I knew more people on the beat. Over the last couple years, as I keep my laser focus on the API space, and often end up going directly to the sources...
I've been doing API Evangelist for a while now. Most of the time I can make this work, and honestly sometimes I just fucking rock it. Right now, I keep stumbling and falling on my face. I've written the same amount of posts I usually do, but none of them are worthy of posting.
I also find many of the conversations I engage in, I'm over...
As I am working on the API and JSON driven visualization strategy for my Adopta.Agency open data work, I saw cloud monitoring platform Librato, publish their new "Space" interface as a Heroku add-on. I like dashboards and visualization tooling that ...
I've been fascinated by the idea of surge pricing, since Uber introduced the concept to me. I'm not interested in it because of what it will do for my business, I'm interested because of what it will do for / to business. Also I'm concerned what this will do the layers of our society who can't afford, and aren't able to keep up with thi...
As I work through the XML, tab & comma separated, and spreadsheet strewn landscape of federal government data as part of my Adopta.Agency work, I'm constantly reminded of how the data being published is often retribution, more than it is anything of actual use. Most of what I find, despite much of it being ...
As I wade through government, higher educational, and scientific research, exposing valuable data, and APIs, the single biggest area of friction I encounter is the acronym. Ironically this paradigm is also reflected in the mission of API Evangelist -- helping normal people understand what the hell an Application Programming Interfa...
As I was working my way through the data for the US federal budget, I noticed a special row in between the years 1976 and 1977. It simply had the entry TQ, and no other information available about what it was.
To get an answer regarding what this entry was, I went t...
I always have numerous side project cooking. Occasionally I will submit these projects for potential grant funding. One of my projects which I called Federal Agency Dataset Adoption, was awarded a prototype grant fr...
I have had a passion when it comes to open data for a number of years. Each time the federal budget has come out in the last 10 years, I would parse the PDFs, and generate XML, and more recently JSON, to help me better understand how our government works. I've worked hard to support open data and APIs in the federal government since 2012, re...
I was listening to the To Cut Food Waste, Spain's Solidarity Fridge Supplies Endless Leftovers segment on NPR today, which made me happy, but then quickly left me sad regarding 99% of the tech sol...
One by-product of being as OCD as I am, is that I am always looking for the smallest possible way that I can help grease the wheels of the API economy. A big part of helping the average person understand any company or API, is possessing a simple image to represent the concept, either a screenshot, logo, or other visualization. A p...
I keep reading stories about federal regulators investigating, and issuing fines to telcos like AT&T paying $105 million for unauthorized charges on customer bills, and Ve...
I spend a lot of time talkng about open data in business, and government of all shapes and sizes. This topic was front and center at APIDays Berlin / APIStrat Europe, and APIDays Mediterranea. Open data was a part of numerous talks, but most importantly dominated conversations in the hallways, and late into the night at the drinking es...
For the most part I ignore the bullshit that flows in my girlfriend @audreywatters Twitter timeline (yes I am watching). We both tend to write some pretty critical things about technology, but for some reason (hmmm, what could it be), her timeline is full of some pretty vocal "dudes" looking to ...
When it comes to many of the areas I research while tracking on the API space, it is common that some areas go dormant—I have learned to accept it. Unfinished, or inactive project used to drive me nuts, but they just “are”, in my current world—subject to further evaluation, if necessary. One of these areas, is t...
