Stories
When you see me at conferences, you might notice that I am often very engaged while at the event. However after the event lets out, and everyone heads off to the bar or pub, you may not find me tagging along anymore. You see, I am finding it increasingly hard to be present, because of one thing--my hearing.
You may not ...
For a brief moment in the API space, we all had swagger. When it all began, we were working towards interoperability in a digital world where none of us actually wanted to work together, after being burnt SOA bad before. We all pretended to be working together, but in reality we were only operating on just a handfu...
When I craft a story for any of my blogs, I use a single content management system that I custom built on top of my blog API. I'm always looking to make it more valuable to my readers by providing the relevant links, but also make it more discover-able, and link-able within my content management and co...
I get a lot of requests from individuals and companies who want to "partner" with me, with many meanings to what this actually means. As a one person operation I have to be very careful who I engage with, because it is very easy for large organizations, with more resources to drown me in talk, meetings, emails, and other alternatives to actual...
I used to be more immersed in the world of top tech blogs, when my partner in crime @AudreyWatters worked at ReadWrite, O'Reilly, and I knew more people on the beat. Over the last couple years, as I keep my laser focus on the API space, and often end up going directly to the sources o...
I've been doing API Evangelist for a while now. Most of the time I can make this work, and honestly sometimes I just fucking rock it. Right now, I keep stumbling and falling on my face. I've written the same amount of posts I usually do, but none of them are worthy of posting.
I also find many of the conversations I e...
As I am working on the API and JSON driven visualization strategy for my Adopta.Agency open data work, I saw cloud monitoring platform Librato, publish their new "Space" interface as a Heroku add-on. I like dashboards and visualizat...
I've been fascinated by the idea of surge pricing, since Uber introduced the concept to me. I'm not interested in it because of what it will do for my business, I'm interested because of what it will do for / to business. Also I'm concerned what this will do the layers of our society who can't afford, and aren't able to keep up with this ...
As I work through the XML, tab & comma separated, and spreadsheet strewn landscape of federal government data as part of my Adopta.Agency work, I'm constantly reminded of how the data being published is often retribution, more than it is anything of actual use. Most of what I find, despite much of it being pa...
As I wade through government, higher educational, and scientific research, exposing valuable data, and APIs, the single biggest area of friction I encounter is the acronym. Ironically this paradigm is also reflected in the mission of API Evangelist -- helping normal people understand what the hell an Application Pr...
As I was working my way through the data for the US federal budget, I noticed a special row in between the years 1976 and 1977. It simply had the entry TQ, and no other information available about what it was.
To get an answer regarding what this entry was, I went to...
I always have numerous side project cooking. Occasionally I will submit these projects for potential grant funding. One of my projects which I called Federal Agency Dataset Adoption, was awarded a prototype grant fro...
I have had a passion when it comes to open data for a number of years. Each time the federal budget has come out in the last 10 years, I would parse the PDFs, and generate XML, and more recently JSON, to help me better understand how our government works. I've worked hard to support open data and APIs in the federal government since 2012, res...
I was listening to the To Cut Food Waste, Spain's Solidarity Fridge Supplies Endless Leftovers segment on NPR today, which made me happy, but then quickly left me sad regarding 99...
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 ...
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 Ver...
Through my work on API Evangelist, and heavy reliance on Github, I have a pretty good handle on the licensing of code involved with APIs--I recommend following Githubs advice. Also derived from
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 esta...
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 "d...
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 the...
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 had...
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 with...
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 t...
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 lay...
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 dat...
