Stories

Kin Lane

No Mojo For Writing On The Road

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...
Kin Lane

Flipping Through The Online Channels Each Day

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 ...
Kin Lane

Reclaim Your Domain - GoDaddy Time!!

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.
Kin Lane

Public Front-end And Private Back-end For My Sites On Github

I moved my public presence onto Github almost two years ago, running API Evangelist as 90+ Github repositories, driving each portion of my presence using Github Pages, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and JSON. Each of my research sites run as a public websit...
Kin Lane

Voting With My User Account: Shutting Down My Quora Profile

In the digital age, being a user of any service, is an endorsement, and vote about whether or not an online service is good or bad. Just as we do in the real world, and shopping at stores that reflect our views, we need to make sure and do the same online. Each time I am frustrated with a service because of their disregard f...
Kin Lane

Cutting Back On My Traveling And Speaking

I’m going to be cutting back on traveling and speaking in the future, and if you are one of the folks who got an email from me, declining an engagement--I’m sorry. I traveled a crazy amount in September, and put on @APIStrat in Chicago<...
Kin Lane

Clarification On The Cease And Desist I Got From @Pluralsight

I wanted to clarify a tweet from yesterday, where I said that "I just got a cease and desist to take down a showcase I did on @pluralsight API training demos. Won't make that mistake again"—if you aren't familiar with them, Pluralsight is “the largest online #ITAdmin, #Developer & creative training library on the...
Kin Lane

Is My Girlfriend Bothering You?

I’ve gotten a handful of emails, DMS, from folks, and seen an uptick in men "complaining", and “worried" about my girlfriend @audreywatters behavior lately. First of all this is nothing new, it is something I’ve gotten for the last 4 years, and I’m constantly seeking balance in...
Kin Lane

The Schizophrenia of Hacker Storytelling

I wanted to take a moment to point out a larger illness in the online world we’ve created for ourselves, while also pointing out my own complicity and illness along the way. My goal is to shed light on problems across the space, and the ultimate denial of tech blogosphere that they are clinically ill, and should quit their jobs today, and...
Kin Lane

I Am Not Signing Anymore NDAs

I just replied to a company who I really like, and trust, letting them know I won’t be signing any more NDAs. They wanted to discuss their very important vision, and next steps for their company, which I really want to learn more about, and hopefully contribute to--so I probably blew it, by saying I wouldn’t sign an NDA....
Kin Lane

Internet Connectivity Reflects Flaws In A Purely Market Driven Approach

As I'm navigating the wifi in yet another airport, where I’m given 20 minutes of free, then I have to pay some arbitrary amount, and my Verizon Mifi doesn't do shit, yet again. Throughout these repeated cycles, I'm reminded of how narrow minded some of the market driven approaches are in the U.S. Don't get me wrong, this isn't a black...
Kin Lane

Forget Being Neutral And Objective Anymore With APIs

I commonly use the statement that I don’t work for any company, and I strive to be a neutral voice in the industry. After four years, I’m going to be ditching that rhetoric, so if you hear me say it, call me out and say bullshit!! First of all I don't believe the concept anymore, and I feel like it was bullshit to begin with, and as the...
Kin Lane

Building The Type Of Audience I Really Want

I used to work hard to write blog posts on API Evangelist that would have broad appeal with the Hacker News community, and at first I didn't have any luck, after trying to engage with readers on posts, I found myself blacklisted, where nothing I submitted showed up. I lived in some kind parallel universe, all because I argued with a couple influ...
Kin Lane

Moving Beyond Server Side Code And Hosting

I remember all the pain and suffering I used to go through in the old days looking for a place to park my server side code, leading me to eventually invest in my own servers, and rack at a datacenter. All of this changed with Amazon S3 & EC2. After 2008 I migrated everything to the cloud, selling all my servers, and never looking back. <...
Kin Lane

Checkout This Lineup Of Speakers At Defrag, Including Myself

Check out this lineup of the first round speakers at Defrag this year! I recently got an email from the event queen Kimberly Norlin, and I'm pretty stoked about some of the people I will be sharing the stage with in Colorado this year. The Norlins rock, whien it comes to bringing...
Kin Lane

6,482 Datasets Available Across 22 Federal Agencies In Data.json Files

It has been a few months since I ran any of my federal government data.json harvesting, so I picked back up my work, and will be doing more work around datasets that federal agnecies have been making available, and telling the stories across my network. I'm still surprised at how many people are unaware that 22 of the to...
Kin Lane

Sorry Google, Your Programming Test Is Not A Valid Measurement Of My Skills

I’ve been talking with a very nice recruiter over at Google over the last couple weeks, and she has been so kind in keeping me updated about opportunities for evangelism at Google. This is the 3rd round of talks I've had with Google while being the API Evangelist, talks that historical...
Kin Lane

My Information Consumption Now Driven By Companies And People, Not Just Feeds

While I still worry about the health of RSS, I feel like my overall information consumption has significantly evolved in some very meaningful ways since Google decided to shut down Google Reader. A year before the shutdown of Google Reader, I had developed my own curation and monitoring system, which included the ability to pull RSS feeds, so I was already ...
Kin Lane

All Government Should Have A Social Media Directory API

I was just looking for a list of Twitter accounts for the City of Chicago, and I came across the standard social media directory page, you will find at most city, coun...
Kin Lane

The Color Of Money When Deploying APIs At The Department Of Veterans Affairs

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, and bring them in...
Kin Lane

Taking Web Service Inventory At The Department of Veteran Affairs

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, and bring them into ali...
Kin Lane

Replacing Legacy Systems With APIs At The Department Of Veteran Affairs

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 in...
Kin Lane

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

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, and bring them into ali...
Kin Lane

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

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 deve...
Kin Lane

Twilio The Hell Out Of The Largest And Most Important Industries

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