Stories
I do not expect everyone to immediately know who I am, and fully understand my mission behind API Evangelist. However I do find it interesting when people have entirely skewed views of who I am, what I do, and then after they meet me, make a 180 degree shift in their perception of API Evangelist.
This post is abou...
With the latest version of Evernote, I’m beginning to look for the next tool for managing my notes. I live and breathe in my Evernote. I am writing this post in there. I depend on the easy note taking via my laptop, mobile phone and tablet. Evernote is the heartbeat of my writing, and I write everything from email, to blog posts, and whit...
As much as I wish for the Internet to remain the open, accessible, neutral, distribute platform it has been since birth, I’m often faced with the reality that net neutrality will lose, in the grip of the powers that be. You see, the AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and other powerful corporate actors in the world do not want it to be open, the...
I get a number of emails, instant messages, and other channel requests to take surveys. All of which I say no thank you. I don’t take surveys, I don’t care what you offer me, I hate the format, and refuse to take part. Surveys remind me of taking tests in school or the corporate work environment, where people were trying to measure my...
I’m sure some of you are happy when I go on the road, because the number of blog posts I publish goes significantly down. I get a lot of folks who jokingly complain about the volume I write, and state it is difficult for them to keep up sometimes. Not sure how I can help you with this one, maybe better read it later tools, or ask your boss to carve out reading time...
I was give my own color TV when I got a Commodore 64 for Christmas in 1980-something. Ever since then, I've had a noisy backchannel in my life. I don’t just like a secondary channel, I often need it to be able to focus on the primary channel--it is just how I operate.
As I reach 20 years on the Internet I can't help compare my current reality with my ...
I cannot think of a better example of my RECLAIM YOUR DOMAIN work, than migrating the last domains from my GoDaddy account. I’ll try to not bore you to death with the GoDaddy story, but it is the single largest point of joy, and suffering, in the development of my digital self, I can think of.
I moved my public presence onto Github almost two years ago, running API Evangelist as 90+ Github repositories, driving each portion of my presence using Github Pages, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and JSON. Each of my research sites run as a public websit...
In the digital age, being a user of any service, is an endorsement, and vote about whether or not an online service is good or bad. Just as we do in the real world, and shopping at stores that reflect our views, we need to make sure and do the same online.
Each time I am frustrated with a service because of their disregard f...
I’m going to be cutting back on traveling and speaking in the future, and if you are one of the folks who got an email from me, declining an engagement--I’m sorry. I traveled a crazy amount in September, and put on @APIStrat in Chicago<...
I wanted to clarify a tweet from yesterday, where I said that "I just got a cease and desist to take down a showcase I did on @pluralsight API training demos. Won't make that mistake again"—if you aren't familiar with them, Pluralsight is “the largest online #ITAdmin, #Developer & creative training library on the...
I’ve gotten a handful of emails, DMS, from folks, and seen an uptick in men "complaining", and “worried" about my girlfriend @audreywatters behavior lately. First of all this is nothing new, it is something I’ve gotten for the last 4 years, and I’m constantly seeking balance in...
I wanted to take a moment to point out a larger illness in the online world we’ve created for ourselves, while also pointing out my own complicity and illness along the way. My goal is to shed light on problems across the space, and the ultimate denial of tech blogosphere that they are clinically ill, and should quit their jobs today, and...
I just replied to a company who I really like, and trust, letting them know I won’t be signing any more NDAs. They wanted to discuss their very important vision, and next steps for their company, which I really want to learn more about, and hopefully contribute to--so I probably blew it, by saying I wouldn’t sign an NDA....
As I'm navigating the wifi in yet another airport, where I’m given 20 minutes of free, then I have to pay some arbitrary amount, and my Verizon Mifi doesn't do shit, yet again. Throughout these repeated cycles, I'm reminded of how narrow minded some of the market driven approaches are in the U.S. Don't get me wrong, this isn't a black...
I commonly use the statement that I don’t work for any company, and I strive to be a neutral voice in the industry. After four years, I’m going to be ditching that rhetoric, so if you hear me say it, call me out and say bullshit!! First of all I don't believe the concept anymore, and I feel like it was bullshit to begin with, and as the...
I used to work hard to write blog posts on API Evangelist that would have broad appeal with the Hacker News community, and at first I didn't have any luck, after trying to engage with readers on posts, I found myself blacklisted, where nothing I submitted showed up. I lived in some kind parallel universe, all because I argued with a couple influ...
I remember all the pain and suffering I used to go through in the old days looking for a place to park my server side code, leading me to eventually invest in my own servers, and rack at a datacenter. All of this changed with Amazon S3 & EC2. After 2008 I migrated everything to the cloud, selling all my servers, and never looking back.
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Check out this lineup of the first round speakers at Defrag this year! I recently got an email from the event queen Kimberly Norlin, and I'm pretty stoked about some of the people I will be sharing the stage with in Colorado this year.
The Norlins rock, whien it comes to bringing...
It has been a few months since I ran any of my federal government data.json harvesting, so I picked back up my work, and will be doing more work around datasets that federal agnecies have been making available, and telling the stories across my network.
I'm still surprised at how many people are unaware that 22 of the to...
I’ve been talking with a very nice recruiter over at Google over the last couple weeks, and she has been so kind in keeping me updated about opportunities for evangelism at Google. This is the 3rd round of talks I've had with Google while being the API Evangelist, talks that historical...
While I still worry about the health of RSS, I feel like my overall information consumption has significantly evolved in some very meaningful ways since Google decided to shut down Google Reader. A year before the shutdown of Google Reader, I had developed my own curation and monitoring system, which included the ability to pull RSS feeds, so I was already ...
I was just looking for a list of Twitter accounts for the City of Chicago, and I came across the standard social media directory page, you will find at most city, coun...
I haven’t written much about my experience last summer as a Presidential Innovation Fellow (PIF) at the Department of Veteran Affairs (VA). I have lots of thoughts about experience at the VA, as well as participating in the PIF program, and I choose to trickle these thoughts out, as I continue to make sense of them, and bring them in...
I haven't written much about my experience last summer as a Presidential Innovation Fellow (PIF) at the Department of Veteran Affairs (VA). I have lots of thoughts about experience at the VA, as well as participating in the PIF program, and I choose to trickle these thoughts out, as I continue to make sense of them, and bring them into ali...
