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...

Programming language Go is one of a handful of popular, new ones aimed at modernizing conventional programming style established by C++ and Java. Go was originally designed at Google in 2007 by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson. There’re many things that make Go a very interesting language. Some of them that I personally...

Due to the explosive growth of the volume of the data we operate on, Big Data has been an increasingly hot topic for the past several years. However, on the journey of tackling the Big Data problem, we are still only seeing the tip of an iceberg. Currently, Big Data is commonly defined as a...

Following is a transcript of a talk that was given at NodeSummit conference in San Francisco, in December 2013. Part One: Fragmented World. Good morning. Thank you for coming to such early talk. I want to share a story with you—a story of how we built an infinitely scalable web API with Node.js. This API...

Credit: this blog post was inspired by and CSS styles for it were shamelessly ripped off of: Smart Quotes for Smart People website by Jason Santa-Maria. Following is a list of key combinations for OS-X Latin standard keyboard that allow easy typing of some frequently-needed characters Character Name Key Combo © Copyright Sign. Option +...

Following is a transcript of a talk that was given at the APIStrategy and Practice Conference in San Francisco, in October 2013. Part One: Your CMS Is Broken. And So Is Mine. I was invited here, today, to tell you about a massive content platform that we built as a Hypermedia API and why it...

RapidSSL wildcard certificates are a relatively affordable (compared to most of its competition) wildcard SSL certificates that can be used to deploy HTTPS services using SSL encryption for any subdomains of your domain. If you need to provide several domains over HTTPS, buying separate SSL certificates for each one of them can be quite costly,...

Organizations that take their tech teams down the “Everything is a Web Service” (à la: Jeff Bezos and Amazon Web Services) architectural route, often and quickly find that such approach can lead to a number of problems: uncontrolled explosion of the number of services, duplication of code, services of varying degree of reliability, inability to...

New York Times’ Snow Fall story has been a whopping success in attracting spotlight. It went viral immediately after publishing, and resulted in many imitations. It has also drawn some constructive criticism. I think Snow Fall is a landmark example of technical excellence of implementation, pushing the boundaries of possible on the web and of...