Rumproarious

Well, around 3ish years ago I stared working for a company that sells software to libraries and I didn’t know a thing. I have learned a lot since then, but I am now embarking on a new journey and I would like to leave some advice to other software devs who might find themselves in similar situations.

The best advice I can give is to find a community who can remind you of how important libraries are.

Managing IAM credentials is a burden. Besides juggling N separate credentials, I don’t more secretes to manage. There must be a better way and I’m experimenting with some tools to find a better way.

After learning about JSON Feed I took some time to implment a template for Hugo. This relies upon version 0.20 of Hugo which has support for many alternative formats. You can see find this in the github repo for this site.

JSON Feed is a new format for syndication that was developed by Brent Simmons and Manton Reece.

This is a great idea. Read the announcment.

I share Gabe Weatherheads sentiment about blogging. Is this it then? Is this the last gasp of independent blogging as everyone moves to micro transactions of half considered thoughts? Will Tweets eat Wordpress? It sure seems like the indie blogs are thinned down to a small collection of ideas and opinions. What I miss about blogging is the slow contemplation of a bloggers ideology. Indie bloggers like Kottke and Daring Fireball have been publishing for over a decade on a daily basis.

Instant articles are cool. They look nice, at least the NatGeo one does. This is a much better reading experience then the average article, especially on mobile. It’s a little weird that Facebook effectively owns the “TV” of mobile content. That being said, Facebook just defined the “Instant Articles” market. If people in general like that experience other apps can capitalize on this new market. Some app could unbundle that experience from Facebook.

PPK is on a tear. He’s having a conversation in public that I’ve been having for a few years. You really should read these three blog posts for context. I appreciate the discussion and I hope that it continues, but the scope is sufficiently broad enough that I won’t be able to go through it all point by point. Instead I would like to provide a framework for the disscussion, thats why I titled this blog post with a quote from Donald Knuth

I don’t know about you, but video conferencing got real this year. Google Hangouts or Skype it doesn’t matter. Videoconferencing became an extension of the table versus a remote connection. I’ve been using IM, Audio Chat, Video chat since I was a teenager. They have all felt like I was having a distant conversation. Which was still great, because without connections we lack humanity, but they we’re all cold forms of communication.

The words full stack will quickly be overburdened, but for now they represents an ideal. The basic premise laid out by Chris Dixon. The new approach is to build a complete, end-to-end product or service that bypasses existing companies. Awesome, we now have this new word, and it’s a word that is getting used a lot from fund-raising, to job listings, to internal memos. Like any new label how the hell do you know if a company is actually full stack?

What is Markdown? Answering this questions is imperative to the future stewardship of Markdown. Many see Markdown as a short hand for HTML. They aren’t wrong, but it’s not the only answer. My answer, Markdown is a shorthand for structured, linked documents. Esoteric, I know, but think about the intended audience of a shorthand for HTML. Then, think about the intended audience of a shorthand for structured documents. That’s the difference between people, who not only know what HTML is but also want a shorthand for it, and pretty much anyone who has ever used Microsoft Word or Google Docs.