Stories
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
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...
I just turned down a potential partnership with a major enterprise company. As I do with many stories, I will scrub the names of those involved, because there is no reason to blame a single company, this is a lesson any large entity can learn from—for this story, we’ll just call them Acme Inc.
Acme Inc. contacted me a couple weeks ...
I getting ready to heading to Berlin in the morning. I'm scheduled to speak at APIDays Berlin on Monday. APIDays is the sister site to #APIStrat, an event you will always find me at, no matter where it...
When I say the word “domain”, what does it conjure in your mind? Most likely if you are in the tech space, or adjacent to it, you think of a Internet domain like "apievangelist.com". A virtual address you can use to point to different resources on the Internet, like websites, applications and APIs.
If you rely on the diction...
I spoke on the business of internal APIs at the IBM Impact conference in Las Vegas, this last Tuesday. About 15 people attended my talk, but the conversations I had with folks afterwards, ...
After I went to Emory University in Atlanta, and spoke at IBM Impact in Las Vegas this week, I...
I currently live in Los Angeles, and I do not own a car. People often don’t believe me when I say I live in Los Angeles without a car, but I do. When I need a vehicle I walk down the road to Enterprise rental car and get the vehicle I need, for only the exact time I need it.
This week I needed to attend a 2 day meeting in Pasadena. Sinc...
I was first introduced to the concept of a personal data locker after discovering The Locker Project by Jeremie Miller (@jeremie). For some of us activist oriented technologists, who live in a Silicon Valley driven world where data is the new oil, a personal data l...
I attended a conference in Vancouver British Columbia last week. Well I didn’t actually attend or speak at the conference, I was just there to support my partner in crime Audrey Watters(@audreywatters). If you have seen me at events, you know Audrey and I usually travel together, and support each other at...
The biggest impact APIs will have at your company will be the internal, cultural change regarding how you do business. We are in the middle of an explosion of APIs, and while there are many new public APIs emerging, the majority of growth is coming from the deployment of internal ...
I just went through 52 services that I depend on, and experienced 52 different ways to manage passwords—most of which sucked! It seems that each service has their own way of allowing you to change your password.
It would b...
After the recent heartbleed security fiasco, I’m spending my weekend going through my list of online services that I depend on, changing my passwords, and along the way I’m going to reclaim as much of my domain as I can.
I will be ...
Over ten years ago I learned the hard away about my domain. I purchased kin lane.com from a website hosting provider I found online, and after they drained over 1K from my bank account for a simple $10.00 website and domain purchase, they proceeded to squat on my domain for almost two years. Eventually I got my doma...
As I go through the management of my 60+ research sites that make up my API Evangelist network, I can't help but think about how I can automate specific aspects of the process. This is the way my custom built platform works, I have workflows and tasks I accomplish each day, and as I have time, I ...
We are getting close to the API Strategy & Practice conference in Amsterdam next week. With less than one week left, I’m going to be really turning up the volume on API Evangelis...
