Stories

Kin Lane

Critical Of Facebook? Let's Apply This Thinking To All Tech Before it Gets Too Big

I'm seeing a lot of critical thinking being focused on Facebook, and even Twitter after this election. I will be joining in th...
Kin Lane

Mobile Was The Start But Now IoT Will Kill Net Neutrality

I am a supporter of the principles of net neutrality -- that Internet service providers should enable access to all content and applications regardless of the source, and without favoring or blocking particular products or websites. However, I can't help but feel that it is do...
Kin Lane

Drones Are A Reflection Of Wider Tech Space For Me

I love thinking about and playing with my drones, but probably not for the reasons you might think. Drones for me are just a reflection of the wider tech space for me and filled with endless opportunities for good and bad examples fo how tech can be put to use. One example from the real world today, that I think reflec...
Kin Lane

Do Not Blog Or Generate Content < Tell Your Story

I scan a lot of blog posts as I work to monitor the API space. I subscribe to well over 1500 blogs at last count and read the titles of thousands of posts, and the full content for hundreds of posts each week. I see it all. Most of what I see is just content. Those 250, 500, or 750 word posts that are so easy to cra...
Kin Lane

What I Run Synthetic Content (#DesignFiction) Through My Network

Some people are really confused by the alternative editions of my sites. If you hadn't noticed the links in the navigation for each of my sites, there is an alternate.kinlane.com and an alternate.apievangelist.com blogs to compli...
Kin Lane

I Did Not Write Everything That I Tweet Out

One thing I notice regularly in my storytelling and sharing in the API space is how many people don't really notice the authorship behind many of the stories floating around. I often see a retweet of one my tweets sharing out a story I have read, where the person references me as the author of it when it's pretty clear that it isn't AP...
Kin Lane

Google Spreadsheet To YAML On Jekyll

I am building out a number of micro tools on Github lately, and since I'm using a lot of the same features across many different projects, before I implement for any specific solution, I am making sure I develop it as a standalone component. I'm tryin...
Kin Lane

My Workbench Blogging

I have my own style to blogging that I call workbench blogging. While I do work to edit and polish the stories I publish regularly across my blogs, it is more important to me that I'm producing content alongside my daily research, than it is to be precise in its delivery. Think of my blogs as my workbench, and the stories you read each ...
Kin Lane

An Air Gap Between Me And The Online World

After coming back from the woods I have worked hard to put in place, and maintain what I'm calling an air gap, between me and the online world. It's basically putting distance between me and what happens in the online world, giving me room to breathe, increasing my overall productivity, and leaving me with more time to be creative. After ...
Kin Lane

Many Dimension Of How Net Neutrality Can Be Interpreted And Used

A European Union agency has said that mobile network's Three's plans to offer ad-blockers would violate net neutrality, which I think is the perfect example of how laws trying to protect the virtue of the Internet will ultimately play out. I'm not saying that we shouldn't try to have t...
Kin Lane

Technology Carnival Barker Prediction Market Will Be Worth 2 Trillion By 2021

One of the themes that really stand out in my monitoring of the API space lately, is the quantity of information that is flowing around out there trying to convince all of us about what the next thing will be. When you are down in the weeds these things tend to flow by and do not mean much, and some even seem like they might...
Kin Lane

Activated Two Factor Authentication With All My Critical Accounts

As I work to maintain my online presence, I am always looking for ways to keep my presence, data, and content-protected. My latest crusade is focused on two-factor authentication. While I did have two-factor authentication enabled for Google, I did not have it enabled for Github, AWS, and Apple. I am not sure why I hadn't, probab...
Kin Lane

My Forkable Base For Building Apps That Run 100% On Github

Github provides a very powerful platform for developing applications. When you use the base Github functionality, in conjunction with Github Pages, and the Github API--some pretty interest approaches to application deployment emerge. I learned this approach from Development Seed while working with the White House to open up da...
Kin Lane

My Client Side YAML Editor Running 100% On Github Pages

I am working on a base template which acts as a seed for all of my micro tools which run 100% on Github. I have a number of little micro tools I want to build, and I needed a ser...
Kin Lane

My Response To People Trying To Sell Me Email Lists of Corporate Users

If you are in the business of technology like I am, you probably get the random emails from people trying to sell contacts from leading technology companies. They are usually pretty savvy at getting past SPAM filters and are persistent at trying to sell the information of leading companies from SalesForce, Microsoft, Amazon, and pretty...
Kin Lane

Keeping Things Static With My Public Presence To Reduce Security Friction

I've been pretty vocal about running the API Evangelist network of sites on Github Pages, ever since I first started doing it back in January of 2013. Back then I was just playing around with the concept, but in 2016 my entire public presence...
Kin Lane

People Telling Me Markets Will Work Things Out And I Should Not Complain

When I am working to push back on various aspects of the API space, one of the ways people feel they need to push back on me is to tell me that I shouldn't be getting all worked up about it--that markets will work things out. Aside from this being a silly argument about something that I don't really acknowledge as a reality (markets do...
Kin Lane

Real Time Is Often More About What They Desire Than What We Want

There are many definitions of what exactly constitutes "real time". I find it is a very relative thing, depending on who you talk to. When asked, many will respond with push notifications as an example. Others immediately think chat and messaging. If you are talking to developers they will reference specific technology like XMPP, Jabber, and W...
Kin Lane

Fine tuning My Real Time For Maximum Efficiency

I am working hard to fine tune my world after coming back from the wilderness this summer. Now that I'm back I am putting a lot of thought into how I can optimize for efficiency, as well as for my own happiness. As I fire back up the old API Evangelist machine, I'm evaluating every concept in play, a process being used, and tool in produc...
Kin Lane

The Blockchain As An Economic Engine For The Cybersecurity Industry

I am slowly getting back into the routine of doing my weekly roundups. It has been a while since I published any, even though I regularly do the work. While I was going through this week's roundup of items I curated, I thought some of the blockchain related goings on were particularly interesting. Read more →
Kin Lane

You Better Collect All The Data Because You Might Need It Some Day

I recently read a couple of articles that focused on the data collection practices of businesses, where the moral of the story was that you should be collecting all the data you possibly can, even if you don't need it because you never know what you'll need in future. This is the popular perspective of a significant portion of the data c...
Kin Lane

Humans Are Always The Weakest Link When It Comes To Securing Our Bits & Bytes

I added a specific project for aggregating and tracking on vulnerabilities in our online infrastructure, in addition to my existing security and cyber security research. Not all of ...
Kin Lane

Using Github Repos And Jekyll As A Data Store

Github repositories are the heart of all of my API research. Each of the 200+ areas of my research lives as an individual repository, and I publish most of my raw research here as JSON, and YAML--then make it viewable, and explorable using JavaScript and HTML. Github + Github Pages + Jeklyll is what mak...
Kin Lane

Ignoring Bad Behavior Then Complaining When Government Regulates

I feel the drone space is a poster child for the overall technology space for me lately. I'm heavily influenced because it is what I have been doing for the last couple months, but as I turn my head back to paying attention to mainstream tech, what I'm seeing with drones has taught me lessons that I'm finding apply very nicely to the wider techn...
Kin Lane

Working To Avoid The Drowning Effects Of Real Time

One thing I'm experiencing as I come out of my Drone Recovery project is the drowning effects of our real-time worlds. I am talking about the desire to stay connected in this Internet age, and subscribe to as many possible available channels (ie. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, RSS, etc.), and more impor...