About a year ago I wrote a blog post about scriptable Hypermedia Clients i.e. the role of the Code on Demand hypermedia constraint - the one from the seminal Fielding dissertation. The post was hopefully OK, but much more interesting was the discussion that ensued, in the comments section, with Mike Amundsen about the future...

Yodiz is an integrated Scrum and bug manager that I have used for a while. For a variety of reasons, largely irrelevant to this post, I decided to move to Pivotal Tracker, instead. Hence I was faced with the necessity to migrate outstanding issues from Yodiz to Pivotal Tracker. Now, both Yodiz and Pivotal allow...

Julia is one of those “next-generation” languages that have gained a lot of spotlight. It’s a specialized language targeted at “technical computing” i.e. things you would normally do in Fortran or R. Except, as opposed to Fortran, it is a modern, dynamic language with parallelism and distributed computing support built right into its core. Thanks...

I have been a fan of Responsive Web Design ever since Ethan Marcotte coined the term in his wonderful A List Apart article. So it was no surprise that the very first initiative I started championing, two days into my new job at NPR in April 2011, was: Responsive redesign of npr.org. Taking a large...

Earlier today, I had a very interesting Twitter exchange with Darrel Miller. That exchange inspired me to share some of my thoughts about media types, in the context of Hypermedia Architecture and APIs. How Many Media Types Do We Need? Before we ask that question, what we really should be asking is: why do we...

Many of us, Mac users, have probably found ourselves in this situation: something annoying or unnecessary starts at system load on a Mac and we want it to just stop. Unfortunately, there’re a whole bunch of ways this can happen so hunting the culprit down can be a challenge. Below you can find listed various...

Today I am going to share with you some of my extremely opinionated thoughts about APIs and the Connected Cars space. Most of my opinions come from two sources: my more recent API work with The API Academy, and my experience before that— leading tech team at a super-prominent media company in Washington, DC. This...

We live in interesting times. There used to be a popular saying that a single issue of New York Times contains more information than what the average 17th-century person encountered in their entire lifetime. Of course, this was when New York Times was still primarily thinking in terms of “printed editions”. Those times now feel...

Vagrant is a very handy command-line tool for managing virtual machines (VMs) and orchestrating consistent developer environments across a team of developers. By default, Vagrant uses Virtualbox VMs. However, it can integrate with other VM providers, as well. I’ve been a huge fan of VMWare for more than a decade now. I really like it....

This comment was written in response to a blog post by Fred Wilson. Specifically, I was reacting to the common “Bitcoin’s security is inherently inpenetrable” misconception, represented in the blog post as the following statement: “Bitcoin’s architecture is similar to the Internet’s architecture. There is no centralized control point. No single point of failure.” Welp,...

It never fails to fascinate how differently do Open Data practitioners look at APIs, compared to applied API practitioners (i.e. people who build APIs for specific business needs). Having spent years in the Open Data world, where I designed and built APIs for large data-publishers such as The World Bank, I sincerely appreciate the “liberate...

A list of necessary, if not always sufficient, steps for inventing something new and valuable: Obsess. Get an obsession with an idea/vision to the extent that you are physically uncomfortable if you don’t work on it. Research. Learn everything there is to learn about existing research/thinking related to the idea. In practice, this means learning...

Woke up this morning to this tweet from Hacker News: Lessons learned from my failed startup after 2 years, 300 users and 0 revenue http://t.co/MowOCvwOjR— news.yc Popular (@newsycombinator) December 31, 2013 Despite the somewhat cliché title, it ended-up being a very thoughtful, honest and interesting recap by @sergiojota I think Sergio does a great job...

The appearence of a text can have significant impact on our ability to: comprehend, enjoy or even be willing to finish reading the text. Unfortunately, default browser font styles still reflect the needs of devices from a different century, and as such are too dense and small, if we are honest about it. While web...

The relationship of the web APIs and the World Wide Web (the medium) has been complicated, to say the least. It feels like APIs constantly try to defy how web is supposed to work. Every time APIs do it, however fundamental laws of distributed computing inavitably punish the rebelious APIs and put them into the...