Stories

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, Micha...

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 AP...

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 th...

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 stor...

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 wor...

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 th...

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 over...

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 con...

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 everythin...

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 com...

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. I&...

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. Read more →

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 on...

I do not expect everyone to immediately know who I am, and fully understand my mission behind API Evangelist. However I do find it interesting when people have entirely skewed views of who I am, what I do, and then after they meet me, make a 180 degree shift in their perception of API Evangelist. This post is abou...

With the latest version of Evernote, I’m beginning to look for the next tool for managing my notes. I live and breathe in my Evernote. I am writing this post in there. I depend on the easy note taking via my laptop, mobile phone and tablet. Evernote is the heartbeat of my writing, and I write everything from email, to blog posts, and whit...

As much as I wish for the Internet to remain the open, accessible, neutral, distribute platform it has been since birth, I’m often faced with the reality that net neutrality will lose, in the grip of the powers that be. You see, the AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and other powerful corporate actors in the world do not want it to be open, the...

I get a number of emails, instant messages, and other channel requests to take surveys. All of which I say no thank you. I don’t take surveys, I don’t care what you offer me, I hate the format, and refuse to take part. Surveys remind me of taking tests in school or the corporate work environment, where people were trying to measure my...

I’m sure some of you are happy when I go on the road, because the number of blog posts I publish goes significantly down. I get a lot of folks who jokingly complain about the volume I write, and state it is difficult for them to keep up sometimes. Not sure how I can help you with this one, maybe better read it later tools, or ask your boss to carve out reading time...

I was give my own color TV when I got a Commodore 64 for Christmas in 1980-something. Ever since then, I've had a noisy backchannel in my life. I don’t just like a secondary channel, I often need it to be able to focus on the primary channel--it is just how I operate. As I reach 20 years on the Internet I can't help compare my current reality with my ...

I cannot think of a better example of my RECLAIM YOUR DOMAIN work, than migrating the last domains from my GoDaddy account. I’ll try to not bore you to death with the GoDaddy story, but it is the single largest point of joy, and suffering, in the development of my digital self, I can think of.