Stories

I spent most of the week on the west coast. It was strange after a year and a half on the east coast. It felt even stranger after a lifetime of living and advocating for the west coast. I have spent short periods of time living in Washington D.C. as well as New York City in 2013 and 2017, but the west coast has always been my base. It has always been the best coast. However, after my travels this week I can see my priorities and perspectives changing.

I used to believe that people didn’t like certain social media outlets because of the features and mechanisms of the user interface, the APIs behind, but also the vision of platform leadership. As I closely monitor the recent shift in social media across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, as well as newer players like Bluesky and Mastodon, I realize this is more about ideological isolation than it is anything technical or even business. The ideological isolation across Twitter, Facebo...

Everyone loves to point out how the World Wide Web has connected us around the globe. One can say that this is true, but one can also say it has also separated us in new and damaging ways. The web has given us more reasons to impose even stricter austerity within our community, schools, and churches—-all of the places that have historically brought us together. Sure the World Wide Web has connected us to people around the world we may not have crossed paths with in the past, but it has fou...

You hear it a lot these days–I don’t have enough ideas, so I need to use AI. I remember feeling the same way in the summer of 2010 as I struggled to get API Evangelist off the ground. I would sit in front of the Google Notebook (RIP) and nothing would flow. Empty. Nada. Zip. Zilch. After a few months of doing more research, reading other people’s writing, and then attending more conferences and meetups the ideas began to flow-—my notebook (Evernote) was getting filled up with rich ideas t...

I hear it regularly from people in the tech space — efficiency is everything. You hear it as the knee jerk response to any critique of capitalism or technology. Businesses are efficient, thus businesses are good. It is a truth that seems to have no logical argument-—you just can’t win the debaate. What I find most interesting is how often and blindly it is wielded, and just how many people refuse to question it, despite sufficient contrary evidence. With any experience working in large ent...

The wife wouldn’t come down and help me carry the player piano home. I took the Poppy dog out for her first walk to the park and there it was—just sitting on the corner of 58th and the Westside Highway.

I remember the first time I walked through an old growth forest with a friend of mine who wasn’t the hippie tree hugger I was at that moment. As we walked about the grand old growth Douglas Fir forest called Sugarloaf I put my hand on the bark of the tree feeling its life and wisdom. My friend put his hand on the tree and declared that this one tree is probably worth at least $25,000 dollars or more, and this whole forest would be worth millions. Ummmmmmm..WTF…bro? It was an eye opener for...

I have had a lot of dudes come at me over the years telling me that stories do not matter. I am a storyteller amidst a technological minefield, and I regularly point out that stories are the most important tool in my toolbox. This is something that tends to rub a certain type of male technologists the wrong way leaving them feeling pretty compelled to tell me that I am oh so wrong, and stories do not matter at all! There, take that!! My long time stalker has been using this as their primar...

Poppy R Lane, the Rottweiler at the center our world just got out of surgery. Poppy found a junior dog sized tennis ball in the park, which I took away from her at the beginning of our regular loop around Central Park in the morning. However, as we closed the loop we noticed she had gone back to the spot where the ball was and for some very, very, very dumb ass reason I gave the ball back to her. Poppy then dutifully carried it all the way home in her mouth pulling tight on her leash the w...

Mediocre by Ijeoma Oluo is one of the books on my deprogramming list of books. The book holds a special place on the list because it describes the systemic programming which I am working to deprogram myself of. I am taking the individual responsibility to repeatedly look at myself in the mirror and atone for my complicity in the violence of white male supremacy. I am not one of the rich and powerful white men, but I am very much complicit i...

Another week in this messed up timeline and another week of people I care about being endlessly obsequious towards the machine. People’s ability to worship and obey the machine operating all around us makes me so very sad. It won’t save you!! It won’t secure you a place at the rich and powerful table. It will just leave you sad and lonely, reminiscing about a time where you think you almost felt human. It will just isolate you. Right now the machine appears to be working for you because yo...

We went for breakfast ramen this morning. You heard that right. I had steak and eggs ramen. It was a lovely and very soul nourishing experience. It was a cold and slushy day as we made our way down to lower Manhattan and found our way into the oddly placed Ramen By Ra. The space, chef, and food were perfectly aligned to sit you down for a warm and nourishing experience that would share with you a very familiar story which had been reimagined to conn...

There is a lot of history present in my new tattoo, but the urgency by which I needed to draw that blood can be seen through my Marvelesque lens of the API universe. Clearly this isn’t an API Evangelist story, which is why it’s here on Kin Lane, so my apologies in advance for the API blah blah blah bleeding over here. Anyways. Let me try to explain my tattoo in the context of what I am seeing happening right now.

I am continuing down my abstraction rabbit hole. I wanted to better visualize what I have been seeing in my head so that I can share with other people, but also so I can keep working on other concepts within this dimension. I have adequately supported how I see (computer science) abstraction in service of APIs, derivatives to further shape the layers of (computer) (financial) abstraction, as well as expan...

Generally speaking the Aye (AI) crowd is made up of some questionable people saying some pretty questionable things, but there are also many good hearted and well-meaning people caught up in the hustle. However, when you look at the upper echelons of who is championing Aye on stage with Trump, do you go—those are my people? Is that thing you are excited about? Is it the same thing those people are excited about? What do you think that means? How does that make you feel? And is it something...

There is a lot of celebration and discussion around AI agents using applications with the recent OpenAI Operator release, and speculation throughout the API community about what this means for APIs. If I am wearing my API Evangelist hat, I’d make similar arguments that the web applications these agents are using are all using APIs, and that the OpenAI Agent also is available as an API, so us API people are safe. Right? Right? Right?

There is a lot of speculation right now out there about what artificial intelligence means for APIs. People love saying there is no AI without API. Which is true. However most of the crystal balling done by the API crystal ballers are just looking at the technical details, as well as the business details from their own perspective selling API solutions. My crystal ball tells me that APIs will indeed be left behind because of artificial intelligence. Let me explain…

I have been shifting my less official, more personal, and sometimes controversial stories over here to Kin Lane, helping make sure my stories on API Evangelist do not scare the normals. This post should get at the heart of what you were looking for when it comes to the relationship of not just AI agents with API governance, but also operations, and individual APIs—because it is all connected.

It is interesting to see what older aspects of the Internet we’ve adopted, as well as the newer parts at the front edge that we are being sold but haven’t yet adopted. I am a huge fan operating within my own domain. Publishing data, content, and artifacts within the domains I own. I also really like the Mastodon and Bluesky protocols, as they both have ways of operating and federating within your own domain. Operating within your domain is everything. It is how you accumulate and retain th...

Whenever I get left behind on a hike, an outing to the park, or maybe a trendy neighborhood—-I get irrationally angry. I have zero tolerance for people who will not wait for me, even if I am to blame for stopping to take a photo or look in the window of a shop. I don’t just get angry, I get downright mean and nasty about it. I’ve learned so much about Kin Lane over the last 25 years that when he gets angry like this I know there is some deep seated emotional reason to blame which has next ...

I have fallen down the abstraction rabbit hole this week. Abstraction is a word I use often in widely imprecise ways. After Audrey called me out, stating that I don’t think you are using that word correctly, I wanted to understand further. I love words. I love rabbit holes. I enjoy the confidence of being precise, and I hate it when I am using words in imprecise ways.

Continuing my exploration into the concept of the digital fracking that is in use with APIs, but in service of wider abstractions like cloud, social, mobile, and AI, I wanted to evaluate some of the high pressure materials in use that help create the most optimal environment for digital resource extraction from companies and individuals. Physical fracking for oil and gas utilizes materials made up of water, sand, and chemical a...

I hate mornings. I wake up angry at the world. Having to get up early has been an injustice ever since I was a teenager. I know getting up at 6:00 AM every morning is better for me, but don’t tell me that at 6:30 AM. I will tell you to fuck off and die, and likely mean it. The struggle with the morning is a real one for me each day, but I take it by the horns willingly, knowing that this is part of my legacy programming that I can’t quite seem to shake, and once the day gets going I will b...

I am looking to frame a common practice I see occurring across the technology sector, but as I do with most of the masters tools, think about ways in which I can use to tear down his house, but also just grease up his hammers, loosen his axe heads, and other things that will just drive him bonkers. My new framing is called “digital fracking”, which also has been called disruption, cloud, APIs, AI, and other incarnations over the years, but is rarely about whatever words are used up front, ...

I spend a lot of time thinking about real world analogies for the Internet, and more recently for artificial intelligence. One analogy for the Internet I keep coming back to is the automobile, something which I think works well when also applied to AI. I feel like artificial intelligence is to the mind what the automobile has been for the body. I predict that in the 2100s we’ll be working hard to extract AI from our daily lives in similar ways to how we are working to extract automobiles f...