Technology Commentary

Designer, game maker, and writer in Portland, OR. One of the good ones.

CC-licensed photo from bre pettis. Bless the toolmakers... but I'm worried that everybody wants to be one. You look at the celebration

At a time when traditional new organizations are struggling to reinvent themselves in a new world, the century-old library is emerging as a digital leader.

I have two exemplary pieces of 21st-century writing that I want to share with you. Neither is hot off the CMSes; they've both aged just a li

As you already know by now from Robin and Tim's posts, DC comics is relaunching the continuity of its primary universe. While I'll admit tha

I CAN'T BELIEVE I'M DOING THIS I'm going to jump in the middle of Robin and Gavin's exchange on the DC Comics reboot, even though I explici

A leaky rocketship.

Percona Everest, now in alpha, is for organizations seeking to harness the benefits of a private database as a service without re-inventing the wheel.

I recently finished Democracy’s Data, The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them, and the book was the closest thing to capturing how I see the Application Programming Interface, or simply the API. I regularly get frustrated with my role in the API universe because of the conflicting force’s between not just API producer and consumer, but also the API service and tooling providers, and the investors who do or do not support them. I am fascinated with this intersection, but also repeatedly horrified by what occurs at this intersection at scale online today.

There is a lot that can stress Nike management, but surely one such scenario is their point of sale system going down during a new product release. Thousands of customers suddenly unable to purchase goods in stores or online due to a system outage

The current model for connected things puts manufacturers inbetween people and their things. That model negatively affects personal freedom, privacy, and society. Alternate models can provide the same benefits of connected devices without the societal and personal costs.

I’ve been shocked by the TDD backlash. “It’s bullshit.” “It’s impossible.” “You can’t make me.” Somebody must have hurt these folks badly. Now, it turns out Soundararajan was asking their question in good faith (see the end for a comment not made in good faith). We agreed that “use it when it makes sense & not when it doesn’t” was a reasonable strategy.

Maturity models make complex things appear simple, but we need to acknowledge the circumstances behind them being imposed on so many organizations.

Despite talk about the possibility of Wasm one day replacing containers — or even Kubernetes — a very good WebAssembly and Kubernetes fit is emerging.

In this post (Part 2/2), we will add the missing piece, the Edge Delta Agent.

Learn how to secure your secrets across applications and infrastructure projects.

A nuanced understanding of the strengths and limitations of each solution is pivotal for making well-informed decisions within your Kubernetes networking strategy.

Toil has always been here and leads to burnout, increased errors and reduced scalability. While it remains, toil mitigation has evolved.

As we look ahead to 2024, it is a fairly obvious prediction that data volumes will continue to rise and there are catalysts aplenty to thank.

It’s the moment you’ve all been waiting for. Are you ready?

I have been thinking deeply about API workflows lately. Meaning, how do you chain API requests together in a certain order. There are many valuable API resources available out there that become even more valuable once you bundle them together. API workflows start with single APIs, maybe paginating through results or searching for results, then incrementally pulling detail pages. Then there are API workflows spanning multiple APIs where you can really start seeing the value of API interoperability, such as crawling the web and harvesting data via scraping APIs, then publishing results to AWS S3, and organizing via your CMS APIs. Individual APIs are the individual Lego building blocks, and API workflows with many APIs are how you build more meaningful sets of Lego villages and spaceships.

With BYOC, not only can you leverage better discounting from the SaaS provider, but you actually own the infrastructure and the data stored there.