Stories
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...
When I walkthrough the junkyard of startups, and business ideas in my mind, I can’t help but feel that much of my current success with API Evangelist has more to do with open ideas, than it does any other aspect. I have numerous startups under my belt, where I tried to capitalize on ideas I've h...
I try to make sense of which companies are doing interesting things in the API space, and the interesting technologies that are done by these companies, that sometimes take on a life of their own. The thing I wrestle with with constantly, is how do you actually do this? The best tools in my toolbox currently are Twitter and Github. These two platforms provide me wi...
I process my thoughts through stories on my blogs, and often times you'll find me bitching about people and companies here on kinlane.com. Other times you'll find me waxing poetic about how nice people can be—welcome to my bipolar blogging world.
In this post, I want to say how much I like finding nice emails from people in my inbox, especially when ...
I’m not going to beat around the bush on this idea, it just needs to get done, and I just don’t have the time. We need an archive.org for email newsletters, and other POP related elements of the digital world we have created for ourselves. Whether we love or hate the inbox l...
The release of the the president's fiscal year 2016 budget in a machine readable format on Github was one of the most important things to come out of Washington D.C. in a while when it comes to open data and APIs. I was ...
I was in Portland, Oregon a couple of weeks ago, and one of the things I do when I visit PDX is drink beer with my little (big) brother Michael (@m_thelander). He is a programmer in Portland, working diligently away at Rentrak. Unlike myself, Michael is a classical...
This is another post in my ongoing series of regular responses I give to people. Meaning when I get asked something so much, I craft blog posts that live on kinlane.com, and I reply to emails, tweets, etc. with a quick link to my standardized responses.
One I get less frequently, but still enough to warrant a response to, “why are you so hard to get...
My friend Matthew Reinbold (@libel_vox) wrote a great piece on his blog titled, Storytelling and The Developer’s Need To Communicate, reflecting on an un-conference session I did last July at A...
As I listened to the the State of the Union speech the other day, and stewed on the topic for a few days, I can’t help but see the future of our nations cybersecurity policy through the same lens as I view our historic foreign policy. In my opinion, we’ve spent many years behaving very badly around t...
This is something I’m working on building manually, but when will the wireless router for my home or business have Docker container support by default? I want to be able to deploy applications, and APIs either publicly or privately right on my own doorway to the Internet.
This would take more work than just adding sto...
Obviously I’m working with APIs.json and Swagger a little too much, because it has really started to affect my dreams. Last night I had a dream where I was working with a university research team to define a machine readable format for migrating concepts from the dream w...
There are a number of data points I evaluate people and companies on while monitoring the API space, but if I had to distill my evaluation of companies down to one things, it would be based upon how much value they give back to the community vs. how much they extract.
You see some companies are really good about providing value to the community beyond just t...
As I read and listen to all of the Internet of Things stories coming out of CES, I’m happy to be hearing discussions around privacy and security, come out of the event. I feel better about IoT security and privacy when I hear things like this, but ultimately I am left with ove...
I’m a big fan of Jekyll based sites. All of the API Evangelist network runs as over 100+ little Jekyll sites, within Github repositories, via Github Pages. This is more than just website technology for me, this is my workspace. When you come across a half finished listing of contacts, or buildin...
I’m in the process of moving from a custom version of my website, and blog manager, a newer version. Back in 2011 I wrote my own custom CMS, as I migrated Audrey and I off WordPress, to deliver more security (obscurity) into our world. As I look to continue the evolution of my CMS, I’m leaving everything behind, and jus...
I’m playing around with a concept right now that I’m calling "Jekyll jobs". As you may know, all of my websites use Jekyll, and run on Github Pages. Currently I have over 100 separate repos, and managing the content, and data across these repos can get c...
I’ve been running all of my websites using CloudFlare since this last Thanksgiving weekend. I pointed all of my name-servers for my primary domains like apievangelist.com and kinlane.com to CloudFlare, and I use them manage my DNS, and other related operations of my primary websites.
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I was looking through President Obama's 2014: A Year in Photos today, and while many of the pictures evoke emotion for me, but this one in particular really summed up for me, the very short time I spent in Washington D.C., as a Presidential Innovation Fellow.
As an independent operator, I have to be very thoughtful about how I spend my time. With this in mind, it is helpful for me to have a standard response that I can give to people who make requests for phone conversations.
If we do not have a prior relationship, or a referral from someone I know well, the chances I’ll just jump ...
