Stories

Replacing Legacy Systems With APIs At The Department Of Veteran Affairs

Aug 13, 2014 · 4 min read

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, slowly bringing them i...

Never Looking Out The Window, Let Alone Trusting Anyone External Of The Department of Veteran Affairs

Aug 13, 2014 · 3 min read

The Blog For Your API Is The Most Important Signals You Can Send

Aug 8, 2014 · 2 min read

A blog is such a simple thing, but when it comes to the world of APIs, it can be one of the most important signals for whether or not an API is worthy of integration, or you should just move on and continue looking for another API to use. I know many folks will dismiss that a blog is so relevant, especially if they are coming from IT or dev...

Twilio The Hell Out Of The Largest And Most Important Industries

Aug 4, 2014 · 4 min read

Irakli Nadareishvili (@inadarei), Dave Goldberg (@davidgoldberg) and I were having an interesting conversation on the Twitterz, after I posted " Read more →

APIs In The University

Aug 4, 2014 · 1 min read

The University of API Prepared By Kin Lane August 2014

Why I Post Stories To My Blog(s) Like I Do

Aug 1, 2014 · 3 min read

I get a lot of folks who tell me how they love my storytelling across my blog(s), but sometimes they find it hard to keep up with my posting style, emphasizing that on some days I post too much, and they just can't keep up. Since I just got home from API Craft in Detroit, and have a mind full of ideas, and Evernote full of have bake...

Please Provide An Easy To Copy Logo And Description Of What You Do

Aug 1, 2014 · 2 min read

I spend a lot of time looking at the websites of companies who are doing cool things in the space. I track on about 2000 companies in the API sector, and as part of this monitoring I add the company name, logo, brief description and usually their Twitter and Github account to my systems on a regular basis. Using this information I will pub...

Reclaim Your Domain LA Hackathon Wrap-up

Jul 22, 2014 · 10 min read

I spent the weekend hacking away with a small group of very smart folks, at the Reclaim Your Domain Hackathon in Los Angeles. Fifteen of us gathered at Pepperdine University in west LA, looking to move forward the discussion around what we call “Reclaim Your Domain”. This conversa...

Hello World

Jul 16, 2014 · 1 min read

Reclaim Your Domain was originally setup during a hackathon at MIT, where Kin Lane (@kinlane), Jim Groom (@jimgroom), and Audrey Watters (@audreywatters), plotted to develop a platform that would help educate people about their online doma...

Driving The #Reclaim Process Using Terms Of Service Didn't Read

Jul 16, 2014 · 4 min read

I’m thinking through some of the next steps for my Reclaim Your Domain process, in preparation for a hackathon we have going on this weekend. Based upon defining, and executing on my own #Reclaim process, I want t...

Considering Amazon Web Service's Continued Push Into Mobile

Jul 15, 2014 · 2 min read

I am still processing the recent news of Amazon Mobile Services. Over time Amazon is continuing to push into the BaaS world, to compliment their existing IaaS, and ...

Nothing Happens Until I Write It Down

Jul 7, 2014 · 1 min read

Now that I've reached the age of 40, I've learned a lot about myself, how my mind works, what I remember and what I don’t. I've also learned a lot about how I'm perceived and remembered by the world around me, both physically and virtually. I first started a blog in 2006, and it took me about 4 years until I found a voice that mattered. It wasn't just ...

Intellectual Bandwidth

Jul 3, 2014 · 1 min read

I got all high on making up new phrases yesterday, with Intellectual Exhaust, and was going to write another on Intellectual Bandwidth (IB), based upon the tweet from Julie Ann Horvath (@nrrrdcore): New fav thing: Having the emot...

Smallest Federated Wiki Blueprint Evangelism

Jul 2, 2014 · 3 min read

I’m playing with a new tool that was brought to my attention called, the Small Federated Wiki (SFW), a dead-simple, yet powerfully extensible, and federated online platform solution, developed by Mike Cauffield. In his latest post about Read more →

Making More Time To Play With The Smallest Federated Wiki

Jul 2, 2014 · 4 min read

I'm always working to better understand the best of breed technology solutions available online today, and to me, this means, lightweight, machine readable apps that do one thing and do it well. One solution I’m looking at is called...

Intellectual Exhaust (IE)

Jul 2, 2014 · 2 min read

As I generate shitloads of content playing the API Evangelist on the Internets, I struggle with certain words, as I write each day—one of these words is intellectual property (IP), which Wikipedia defines as: Read more →

Remembering My Friend Pat Price

Jul 1, 2014 · 3 min read

Sometimes you meet people, and you automatically know that they are someone you will know for a very long time, with a sense that you’ve known them before, in many previous lives. This was the way I felt when I first met Patrick Price. He was polite, co...

Disrupting The Panel Format At API Craft SF

Jun 18, 2014 · 2 min read

Last week I particpated in a panel at API Craft San Francisco with Uri Sarid(@usarid), Jakub Nesetril(@jakubnes...

Ken Burns: History of Computing

Jun 9, 2014 · 3 min read

I’m enjoying Mike Amundsen’s keynote from API Strategy & Practice in Amsterdam again, Self-Replication, Strandbeest, and the Game of Life What von Neumann, Jansen, and Conway can teach us about sca...

Exhaust From Crunching Open Data And Trying To Apply Page Rank To Spreadsheets

Jun 9, 2014 · 2 min read

I stumbled across a very interesting post on pagerank for spreadsheets. The post is a summary of a talk, but provided an interesting look at trying to understand open data at scale. Something I've tried doing several times, including my Read more →

Reclaim Your Domain Workshop (1)

Jun 8, 2014 · 2 min read

As part of the Domain of One’s Own Incubator at Emory University earlier this year, Kin and Audrey facilitated a workshop (a discussion, really) about “Reclaim Your Domain.” The Google Doc can be found here. ...

The Black, White And Gray of Web Scraping

Jun 6, 2014 · 2 min read

There are many reasons for wanting to scrape data or content from a public website. I think these reasons can be easily represented as different shades of gray, the darker the grey being considered less legal, and the lighter the grey more legal yo...

Github Commit Storytelling: Now or Later

Jun 6, 2014 · 1 min read

When you are making Github commits you have to provide a story that explains the changes you are committing to a repository. Many of us just post 'blah blah’, ‘what I said last time", or any other garbage that just gets us through the moment. You know you’ve all done it at some point. This is a test, of your ability to t...

That Has Already Failed Dumbass

Jun 5, 2014 · 2 min read

I a always amused when someone jumps on an idea of mine, or one of my projects, proceed to tell me how stupid I am, then point to some similar technology or approach had previously failed. First I always take it as a lesson, and make sure I fully understand what they are referencing, and spend some time understanding what happened. Th...

I Cannot Sit Idly By As Technology Marches Forward

Jun 5, 2014 · 3 min read

I’ve given up some pretty cushy jobs in my career. One defining aspect of the failure of my previous marriage was my inability just accept my role, sit idly by enjoying the benefits of being a good employee in a small town. From my smalltime existence in Eugene, Oregon I saw the Internet unfold, and beginning in 2005 I saw the potential of...