Stories

I find myself even more aware of the demands being placed on our lives through Internet-enabled technology after spending two months in the wilderness, away from my computer and cell phone. As I fire up my tools for monitoring the API space, the assault on our digital self by the tech community streams by on the scream like a scene from the Matrix movie. One of the tools I operate regularly is called Charles Proxy. Read more →

I love Evgeny Morozov's (@evgenymorozov) tweet defining the acronym SMART as Surveillance Marketed As Revolutionary Technology. It has provided me with a wealth of material for my alternate storytelling channels, and provides an excellent litmus test to apply to companies I co...

I am doing an increased amount of monitoring of security, vulnerability, and cybersecurity reports lately. While doing this type of work, it can become easy to slip into despair, as you realize how vulnerable we are to attack, in conjunction with how badly behaved everyone is being on all sides. As I see it, we have to work very har...

There are many differences between the leading blogging platforms like Blogger, WordPress, Tumblr, and Blogger. Different types of bloggers will view these solutions in different ways, with very different reasons behind why they (we) do.  Each of these blogging platforms has their pros and cons, and bring a variety of network eff...

Two things Americans are suckers for are entertainment and convenience. We will give up almost anything if it makes our life easier, and keeps us entertained--no matter how simple that is. We love our movies, tv shows, and games, and we love ever...

It's been almost three months since I've written anything on API Evangelist, and sitting down to form my thoughts into some sort of coherent blog post is proving to be more challenging than I imagined. I now realize how much of my storytelling has been driven by the momentum I have built up in six years of writing about APIs.  Th...

I often fall for the Kool-Aid flavor of the day, out of tech community. I'll be sipping it regularly, thinking I'm immune to its effects, until one day I'm like, "that is some damn good cool raspberry flavor!". Even though I know better, I still get duped by the magic of it all sometimes. When I read the regular flow of marketing comin...

  Utilizing Eagle Eye Network’s Managed PoE Switch with your Eagle Eye Networks system will provide an even greater level of manageability and more functionality than ever before, allowing for remote configuration and management.  Now, authorized users will be able to power cycle an individual PoE camera or the entire switch remotely. 

I feel like “the savage” in Aldous Huxley’s A Brave New World as I begin to get back to my Twitter stream and RSS feeds — I just want to read Shakespeare. I’m eight weeks into Drone Recovery, I just finished re-reading A Brave new World, and I am finding it very difficu...

My partner in crime Audrey and I have been struggling her son's depression, and pharmaceutical pill addiction for a couple years now. This is not the type of thing you plan for, and when it happens, your response involves keeping it as quiet as possible when it comes to friends, family, and the public. Nobody wants to be tha...

I got rid of my cell phone number 541-913-2328, which has been my AT&T driven identity since 1999. I'm not doing much traveling this year, so having a $100 / month bill for a thing, that sits in the corner made no sense. Honestly, if feels fucking great not having, but that is another story. Beyond it feeling good, in the wake, I'm...

I started API Evangelist on the premise that the API community while immersed in a debate about the merits of REST and Hypermedia, were ignoring some very important aspects around the business of APIs. Six years later, these business considerations still plague the space, but I'd add a lack of awareness of the industry, organizatio...

I was talking my friend Dan Cundiff about Page2RSS shutting down, and the viability of offering up tools like this for us mere mortals to use in our every day work. Hmm, page2rss shutdown quickly - it will be missed. Makes IFTTT recipes for that sort of thing a little harder to cook up. — Dan Cundiff (@pmotch) Read more →

I am an old database guy. I got my first job working on databases in COBOl in 1987. I have worked with almost every database platform out there, and I love data. I remember writing my own indexes, relationships, and other things we take for granted now. I remember being religious and dogmatic about the platforms I used, which included ...

My ongoing stories around how APIs can help make business, educational, healthcare, government, and the other transactions that we are increasingly seeing move online, be more transparent--enjoy a regular amount of snickers, subtweets, and laughs from folks in the space. Whether it is about opening up access to our social media dtaa, al...

I have made a lot of mistakes, and made plenty of totally incorrect assumptions about the API space in my last five years trying to help seize this narrow window of opportunity I feel we have, when it comes to defining our digital self--using APIs. As business leaders, IT, and developer practitioners, APIs provide us a big opportunity to understand our digital a...

As I monitor the wacky world of bots that is unfolding, I am beginning to see some pretty distinct pools of bot focused implementations, which tell me two things: 1) There will be a lot of activity in this space in the coming year & 2) It is going to be a shit show helluva ride.  If you haven't picked up on it yet, every...

Github has been playing a central role in my existence as the API Evangelist for a number of years now. I began migrating all my side project to use Github Pages back in January of 2013, something Read more →

When you talk about Reclaim Hosting, or Reclaim Your Domain concepts of owning, and operating your domain, and living a POSSE way of life to your average IT or developer folk, they will most often shrug, point to GoDa...

I get the whole spectrum of spelling and grammar trolls as the API Evangelist. I get the ones who are nasty, and leave comments about how they'd respect what I say only if only I'd learn to edit. All the way to my favorite ones who submit pull requests with corrections...and everything else in between.  This post is about the ones...

This posted started as a Tweet the other day, but since I'm in a ranty mood today, I pulled it out to help emphasize several other stories I've written today. A pretty standard response I get from folks who have been indoctrinated into the Silicon Valley culture, when I write or say something that is pushing back on VCs, is di...

photo credit I'm playing catch up wit...

As I'm working my way through my news feeds, aggregated across the blog RSS and Twitter streams of the companies I track on in the API space, as well as the leading organization, and individual tech blogs I subscribe to, I am noticing one of several storytelling memes being tested at any given moment. The tech ...

I was just having a conversation with a friend on a social network about test-driven development (TDD) and behavior-driven development (BDD), as we progressed through the conversation I used both my blogs kinlane.com and apievangelist.com as references for thoughts I've had on the subject, providing them with a single URL to get more information from me. I shared URLs for 3-5 ideas/thoughts I've had.....giving me a much better way to recall what I know and thoughts I've had -- ...

Often times I feel like I'm swimming upstream in my daily work. My work is not ad-based. It is based upon individual human relationships that I have with actual people. Remember people? Those are the carbon life forms we all have to meet with in the real world,Not the virtual representations we interact with online each day.  Often tim...