Stories

I get a lot of folks who tell me how they love my storytelling across my blog(s), but sometimes they find it hard to keep up with my posting style, emphasizing that on some days I post too much, and they just can't keep up. Since I just got home from API Craft in Detroit, and have a mind full of ideas, and Evernote full of have baked...

I spend a lot of time looking at the websites of companies who are doing cool things in the space. I track on about 2000 companies in the API sector, and as part of this monitoring I add the company name, logo, brief description and usually their Twitter and Github account to my systems on a regular basis. Using this information I will publi...

I spent the weekend hacking away with a small group of very smart folks, at the Reclaim Your Domain Hackathon in Los Angeles. Fifteen of us gathered at Pepperdine University in west LA, looking to move forward the discussion around what we call “Reclaim Your Domain”. This conversat...

Reclaim Your Domain was originally setup during a hackathon at MIT, where Kin Lane (@kinlane), Jim Groom (@jimgroom), and Audrey Watters (@audreywatters), plotted to develop a platform that would help educate people about their online domai...

I’m thinking through some of the next steps for my Reclaim Your Domain process, in preparation for a hackathon we have going on this weekend. Based upon defining, and executing on my own #Reclaim process, I want to...

I am still processing the recent news of Amazon Mobile Services. Over time Amazon is continuing to push into the BaaS world, to compliment their existing IaaS, and Pa...

Now that I've reached the age of 40, I've learned a lot about myself, how my mind works, what I remember and what I don’t. I've also learned a lot about how I'm perceived and remembered by the world around me, both physically and virtually. I first started a blog in 2006, and it took me about 4 years until I found a voice that mattered. It wasn't just a ...

I got all high on making up new phrases yesterday, with Intellectual Exhaust, and was going to write another on Intellectual Bandwidth (IB), based upon the tweet from Julie Ann Horvath (@nrrrdcore): New fav thing...

I’m playing with a new tool that was brought to my attention called, the Small Federated Wiki (SFW), a dead-simple, yet powerfully extensible, and federated online platform solution, developed by Mike Cauffield. In his latest post about Read more →

I'm always working to better understand the best of breed technology solutions available online today, and to me, this means, lightweight, machine readable apps that do one thing and do it well. One solution I’m looking at is called ...

As I generate shitloads of content playing the API Evangelist on the Internets, I struggle with certain words, as I write each day—one of these words is intellectual property (IP), which Wikipedia defines as: Read more →

Sometimes you meet people, and you automatically know that they are someone you will know for a very long time, with a sense that you’ve known them before, in many previous lives. This was the way I felt when I first met Patrick Price. He was polite, cord...

Last week I particpated in a panel at API Craft San Francisco with Uri Sarid(@usarid), Jakub Nesetril(@jakubnese...

I’m enjoying Mike Amundsen’s keynote from API Strategy & Practice in Amsterdam again, Self-Replication, Strandbeest, and the Game of Life What von Neumann, Jansen, and Conway can teach us about scal...

I stumbled across a very interesting post on pagerank for spreadsheets. The post is a summary of a talk, but provided an interesting look at trying to understand open data at scale. Something I've tried doing several times, including my Read more →

As part of the Domain of One’s Own Incubator at Emory University earlier this year, Kin and Audrey facilitated a workshop (a discussion, really) about “Reclaim Your Domain.” The Google Doc can be found here. ...

There are many reasons for wanting to scrape data or content from a public website. I think these reasons can be easily represented as different shades of gray, the darker the grey being considered less legal, and the lighter the grey more legal you...

When you are making Github commits you have to provide a story that explains the changes you are committing to a repository. Many of us just post 'blah blah’, ‘what I said last time", or any other garbage that just gets us through the moment. You know you’ve all done it at some point. This is a test, of your ability to te...

I a always amused when someone jumps on an idea of mine, or one of my projects, proceed to tell me how stupid I am, then point to some similar technology or approach had previously failed. First I always take it as a lesson, and make sure I fully understand what they are referencing, and spend some time understanding what happened. Ther...

I’ve given up some pretty cushy jobs in my career. One defining aspect of the failure of my previous marriage was my inability just accept my role, sit idly by enjoying the benefits of being a good employee in a small town. From my smalltime existence in Eugene, Oregon I saw the Internet unfold, and beginning in 2005 I saw the potential of t...

While there are many things I don’t agree with Google about, but they are pioneers on the Internet, and in some cases have the experience to lead in some very important ways. In this scenario I’m thinking about Google Account management, and how it can be used as blueprint for all other Software as a Service (SaaS) applica...

I started beta testing a new JavaScript library, combined with API, that I’m calling linkrot.js. My goal is to address link rot across my blogs. There are two main reasons links are bad on my site, either I moved the page or resource, or a website or other resource has gone away. To help address this problem, I wrote a simple J...

When I run into enterprise folks at events, one of the common characteristics I notice, is they always tell me how much they read my blog. Yay! Many of these people have Twitter accounts, which follow me and I follow them, and they can usually reference specific topics or posts I've written—demonstrating they do indeed read. Most o...

API discovery has not changed much since 2005, when John Musser launched ProgrammableWeb, the API directory we've all come to know and love. In 2014 (9 years later), we have Mashape and a handful of other API directory...