Technology Commentary

The origin story of LibreOffice, the open source office solution that ensures you always have access to your data and control over your creativity.

I am using C for a professional project. I believe in memory safety. Yes, I'm a hypocrite, but please, let me explain.

Kestrel : A completely open computer design.

Kestrel : A completely open computer design.

I am corresponding back and forth with what I will call an open source and API standards therapist for now, helping me make sense of the ocean of API standards I am drowning in and assisting me in finding a way forward with. In my personal style, I need to write my way forward, processing what they have been sharing, and try to find ways I can take meaningful steps forward.At the scale and scope in which I operate in, it is a daily challenge for me to not be overwhelmed by what is happening around me, and even more difficult to herd the API cats forward in any way. This post is a digest of the wisdom this person is sharing with me, organized in a way that helps me process, and then hopefully assist me in taking one or two steps forward with what I am doing with both of my API Commons and APIs.json projects.   A Loose Federation of API Standards I am working towards API Commons becoming a loose federation of API standards, with APIs.json being the discovery mechanism for these standards and how they are applied in real world situations. I strongly believe that the world of API standards would benefit from having more people involved, but most technical, and especially non-technical folks aren’t even aware of what’s going on with API standards today. I can see all the disparate and meaningful pieces of API standards that exist today but to outsiders and people just driving by it is very difficult to see them and understand how they work together.   It is too difficult for insiders even to keep up with best practices in this space, understand where to look for information, making the process of choosing between competing standards is often time consuming, unpleasant, stressful, and rife with misinformation. I struggle, and I am intimate with most of the standards, people, and activities occurring. I can only imagine it is completely overwhelming for others to make their way forward with very simple concepts like should I use REST or GraphQL. I envision the API Commons to be a place where you can observe and discover what is happening, and this shouldn’t take too much effort because there is already a lot going on across all of these communities—-they just don’t always properly project and communicate the value.   No Shared Understanding of the Value of Standardization We all pay a lot of lip service to standardization and interoperability, but if I’ve learned anything after 12 years steeped in the world of APIs, it is mostly an illusion and theater. Honestly, I struggle with being able to tell if someone is just talking about the importance of standards because they are lying, or they actually don’t understand what it all means. This is one of the things that caught my attention early on when it comes to the passion, dogma, and even venom that is present when we talk about APIs, standards, protocols, and the common ways in which we deliver our technology. My API standards therapist focuses in on three separate dimensions of this dilemma: Decision-makers don’t grok the business value of standards. Some are even concerned by the potential for negative impact on what they (mistakenly) believe are competitive advantages. Developers aren’t incentivized to adopt standards, suffer from Not-Invented-Here syndrome, and probably consider that standards folks are sitting in their ivory towers disconnected from the reality of day-to-day software development (they might be onto something about that later point). Standards folks tend to focus on the technical aspects of the work they’re doing at the expense of broader benefits. For example, by putting consistency between APIs over common practices.

I’ve heard this phrase seven times now from people on Twitter and LinkedIn-—that Elon Musk is just making a business decision to charge money for the Twitter API because it costs Twitter money. In the moment, with your narrow capitalist blinders on, this is a very logical argument. As someone who has been arguing that Twitter should be charging for their API for over a decade, this argument isn’t as sophisticated and logical those wielding it might think. I know this isn’t what you want to hear, but there are a lot of other currents flowing around this discussion than the business one you are taking for face value. Of course, Twitter has the right to charge for their API, and alongside version 2.0 of their API , they have been, and it is something I have been praising. However, their decision to shut down their free API has very little to do with revenue, and everything about power and control.

I am pissed about Twitter shutting down free access to their API. It genuinely breaks my heart. I’ve seen many people who do not quite grok how I feel, so as I do with any topic, I am looking to do some storytelling around the subject. After diving in for a day, I can tell this isn’t going to be something I can make sense of in a single post, and predict there will be several essays required, and honestly, I am feeling like I want to get into book mode on this subject. Seriously, I am not exaggerating when it comes to my belief that Twitter is the most important API-—or it was. After looking through the almost 3000 blog posts from the Twitter blog, I feel like I need to work through my thoughts on this important subject.

The ability to separate the deployment and release of service (and corresponding API) is a powerful technique, especially with the rise in the progressive delivery approach.

In which I finally realize the date calculation commands I wrote years ago would work better as a single Keyboard Maestro macro.

Tech is increasingly divorced from the real economy thanks to the COVID hangover and Apple’s App Tracking Transparency

Treat your database as Code

In the beginning the Sysadmin created the Infrastructure and the Network.And the Infrastructure was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.

It is very likely that many of us will see some of our work replaced by AI.

I’ve been following with great interest this series of articles by John Gruber (and Matt Birchler’s related story) about the chasm between iOS and Android apps. I have some thoughts since expanding my app knowledge beyond iOS and iPadOS is one of my goals for 2023. About a month ago, during my holiday break, I

W Curtis Peston, aka Mr Backup, has spent 30 years in the backup industry and we interviewed him about the changes during that time.

Recently, I had a chat with a friend who was frustrated by their company culture. They’d been pushing the company to operate with more urgency, but didn’t feel like it was landing. “How do we,” they wondered, “get the team to recognize that urgency is essential to our success?” They were convinced this was an internal cultural problem, mentioning the classic, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” quote often attributed to Peter Drucker, although probably incorrectly.

The introducer-in-chief introduces two people to each other, and then steps aside and lets those two work together. That's when the principles of the Open Organization come into play.

In the second part of this series, I explore community thinking patterns #4 and #5. Then, I provide a fictional scenario to illustrate thought processes and community influences.

The history of everyone’s favorite attempt to keep the suspense going for a little bit longer, the spoiler alert. People who spoil things are evil. Obviously.

Is edge computing the next frontier of technology or is it just another place where we deploy and operate computers?