Stories

One of the things Sue Smith and I talked about the other day in our Write Through It conversation was how you can orient yourself in a system you didn’t build. It is a continuation of mine and Sue’s beliefs around the state of “View Source”, but beyond just learning web development, and actually understanding how systems work, not just a single website or web applicati...

I literally learned to program by right clicking on web pages and selecting view source. I am not classically trained as a programmer. I did not go to university. I just began reverse engineering what others built towards the end of the last century, and kept doing it in this century until I knew what the hell I was doing.

I keep trying to think about nothing, and it turns out thinking about nothing takes a lot of work. The moment I clear the deck and try to sit in the empty space, my mind rushes in to fill it—old conversations, half-finished projects, the next thing I am supposed to be doing, the last thing I should have done differently. Nothing is apparently the one thing my brain refuses to leave alone.

When I left Bloomberg almost two years ago the artificial intelligence hype of the market was overwhelming. It was noisy and chaotic. It still is, but I’ve found “my” signal in the noise. My feelings about AI haven’t changed. I am still 100% against it, but I have spent the last year HEAVILY using it so that I can understand the noise of the markets, and what people are saying when they get all glossy eyed and evangelical about this technology.

I have had several conversations lately about burnout. I have had three pretty high profile burnout / meltdowns on API Evangelist, beginning with the summer I spent with Isaiah, which was different than the other two, which resulted from me working with StreamData and Postman. Both the conversations I had this week about burnout emphasized preventing the fourth one, which I actually don’t agree with all that much. I think the damage can be minimized from burnout, and I can definitely make ...

On this rainy Memorial Day Weekend I find myself moving from my laptop next to my chair to the couch where I have two books I am reading. One is Cyberlibertarianism, The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology by David Golumbia and The Burning God by R. F. Kuang. It is common for me to be reading one piece of fiction and one non-fiction—it is how I balance.

As I exist with one leg full in the AI hustle and one leg outside in the real world, I am realizing the divide that is continuing to widen between us. Personally I would love to just get offline and exist 100% in the real world. I don’t like AI at all. But I have one more big push in the technology sector before I try to tap out once more. So I have to be immersed in it daily. I don’t have to like it, but I do approach it all with an open mind. One thing I notice though, is that there are ...

It is something you hear from folks about why they use artificial intelligence. Interestingly, it is the same thing people would say before this moment when you asked them why they don’t write. As I sit here on a Sunday afternoon, writing various fictional and non-fictional stories in my notebook, as well as running multiple Claude agents to crawl and produce machine-readable artifacts for thousands of different companies—you can really feel the extraction that occurs, leaving us without i...

I am fascinated by writing across my domains right now. I have several other lesser domains, but my primary ones kinlane.com, apievangelist.com, and naftiko.io, are what have my full attention in this moment of storytelling. I love writing. I love finding and telling stories. It really is the only thing that matters to me in all of this craziness we are doing online today. Chasing stories is what gets me up and keeps me going each day, and the rest is just noise from my perspective.

I was riding in the park with Poppy the recently and we had stopped to watch a couple of squirrels when a gentleman walked up to say hello and talk to us. He was a friendly fellow, and said he’d seen us before and was curious to know more about who we were and why we were riding around the park. After talking a bit, he said he remembered mentioning to his friends how I looked like a nazi with my menacing Rottweiler and sidecar.

I am always amazed the power of storytelling. Many people snicker and poke at me when I call myself a storyteller and like to diminish the role of telling stories. It’s not real. It’s for the fun things. It isn’t for grown-up businesses. Which is actually where storytelling matters the most, has the most power, and I always find the people in this camp are the ones who are easiest to manipulate using stories. Because they are completely unaware of what is going, or are they?

I am gathering signals from leading enterprises to understand what they are investing in. One of the ways that I gather signals is harvesting the job postings they publish. While not entirely honest, they are the most honest public signal available online today about a company. It is something they have to standardize and make public because they want to attract candidates, but like other signals they are also shaped to accommodate the larger enterprise narrative. With that said I find the...

I had a conversation with someone about their burnout and their theatrical exiting of technonology sector to explore something new. We talked about their journey, and how I am on my 3rd burnout heading for my 4th at some point. I don’t think it is unavoidable, but that is another post. This one is about choosing to say within the machine, despite the lack of oxygen, nutrients, and care, as well as the recurring waves of people I know who head for the exits.

I bought a ticket to see Ken Burns talk about his latest documentary on The Revolution War last night at the Metropolitan Museum of Art here in New York City. I very much needed to get out of the house after many days of avoiding the freezing temperatures outside. It turned out to be very much be what I needed this week in response to the last week’s of news and death i...

I wanted to relax on the couch this morning, but the stories coming out of Minnesota leave me needing to write. I don’t have as much emotional skin in the game now that my Trump supporting mother has passed, but I can’t help but reflect on the stories I was told growing up, and the deep hypocrisy of this moment when it comes to the government being perceived as the enemy, and Americans possessing the right to own guns. I grew up in a perpetual belief that the government was coming for you,...

I read and write my way through the beautiful chaotic mess that is my brain. I use it to get through each day, and today I need to get through my anxiety about going to sleep tonight with the possibility that someone I love very much might not being there in the morning. I went to sleep eventually last night, and after I awoke today, I messaged to make sure they were still with us, and thankfully they were. I am grateful. <3 However, this doesn’t mean that anxiety goes away, as tomorrow...

It is hard to pay attention to things right now. I want to be engaged with the world, but I need to focus on my new startup. I can’t drop this ball. When I do pick my head up, I can tell shit is going to get worse. I can tell, because the tone, color, and vibrations out there right now feel just like the signals I tune into when I feel like I am mentally and emotionally spinning out. But instead of it just being me and my view of things, it is everyone. We are all experiencing it collectiv...

I struggle waking up each morning. I have never been a morning person, but since Covid, mornings are sharper and more painful. I’ve long known that I am a better person when I wake up at 6:00 AM in the morning, but the sharper edge to mornings recently leaves me wanting to understand more about why, and possibly do some work on whatever is grinding on me—hence this post.

Watching a young man struggle with his new found super powers recently has me thinking about what the world was like for me early on as I discovered my own super powers. I was probably 12 or 13 when I first noticed something was different, but it would be another decade or two before I got any sort of grip on what was happening to me, and learn how to function in the world as a 6’ 3” man who was waking up to find out that you are the eyes of the world.

It took me about 50 years to get my brother’s voice out of my head. My oldest brother Jack tormented me (and my family) throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. About halfway through the 1990s I grew bigger than him and was able to physically keep him from tormenting me, but it would take another 20+ years before I was able to keep him from mentally tormenting me. Stories are powerful, especially when they are told to you within an abusive relationship you can’t escape from.

It is difficult to maintain a grip on a spinning world. As the world recently began shifting back from being the longest and sunniest days to an inevitable march into darkness and coldness, I lost my grip for a moment as the velocity changed without me.

It is amazing what the ritual morning walk through the park can do. The morning begins by finding your way through the wreckage. Everything that was destroyed by the previous day but couldn’t be salvaged and flushed as part of the evening dream cycles.

I drove up to Maine and back last week. It was the first time I have driven in over a year. I do not miss it. I have already spent large chunks of time not owning a car or driving in the last decade, but living with a functional public transit in a city that has everything I need while not owning a car has changed me. I do not want to go back. I want to spend the rest of my life not driving if at all possible. I will drive when I must, but I will work as hard as I possibly can to stay out ...

Audrey messaged me with a heads up that there would be a critical mass ride from Union Square to City Hall in protest NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch’s Draconian crackdown on e-bikes in NYC. Audrey has ballet Friday evenings, so it was a perfect time for Poppy and I to get out on the bike and show our support for cyclists in NYC. We had already done four loops of Central Park that day, but we were up for the ride down to Union Square in support of the movement.

I hear a lot of folks shaming us people who are shaming people for using artificial intelligence. There is a lot of concern that if you shame young people, or other people who aren’t familiar with the inner workings of the technology and business surrounding AI, you will do some damage to their confidence and feelings, or I guess the market.