Disclaimer: In this post, I describe business models of tech companies where I hold positions. Don’t use this to draw conclusions about any specific company or rationalize any particular investment. Follow your own investment strategy, not some knucklehead with a blog. In the last few years, we’ve seen a variety of major tech companies go […]
Every day, you put yourself and your ideas out there and get shot down. If you’re bad at it, you get shot down again and again until you finally give up. If you’re good at it, you get shot down again and again until you get to something that works. Fundamentally, they’re not that different. […]
I’ve enjoyed comic books since I was a little kid. I grew up on Super Friends, and Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, and Adam West’s Batman. A few years later, I moved to the big screen adaptations of Batman, Spider-Man, and numerous others. The stories of epic adventure, the triumph of good over evil, and […]
Late last summer, I participated in a panel discussion at my favorite conference of the year: That Conference. Wait, which conference? That Conference! Now that we have that out of the way, let’s dig in.. You can catch the full video here but first some background. If you listen closely, you’ll realize that we have […]
After college, I resolved to read one book a month. It can be fiction, non-fiction, technical, business-oriented, or whatever as the goal was to always be absorbing and digesting new ideas and information, even just for fun. More recently, I’ve generally tried to read 3 per month which works great with a Kindle and a ton of […]
I’ve worked for organizations of every size, from being employee #1 to starting at #25 to a massive US federal department. Further, I’d advised companies starting from a single founder to a couple hundred employees. From being on every side of that, one of the things I’m most sensitive to is job title but probably […]
OAuth 2.0 (RFC 6749) is a great authorization framework but it leaves much up to the imagination. Luckily, there are numerous extensions that expand, explain, and clarify the basic capabilities to build a robust and powerful suite of standards. That said, there’s one unobviously complex area which gets little attention: Scopes. What is an OAuth Scope? […]
Building software is hard. You have all the fun of being excruciatingly specific in certain situations, incredibly general the rest of the time, and expressing all of it in a language that isn’t your own. In the context of a new product – whether it’s for a startup or an established company – it’s even […]
API Documentation comes in a variety of forms. You can find it in pdfs, html, or even a Postman-collection that lets you play immediately. You can provide project examples, detailed blog posts, or video walk throughs.There are tradeoffs of each. Regardless of how you deliver the documentation, all documentation fall into one of three buckets: […]
I’m not a branding strategist. I am not a designer. I came into technical marketing through the backdoor of developer evangelism. In terms of my own approaches to marketing, I have reasonably good instincts but nothing resembling formal training. That said, I know when something is awful. A few years ago, my friend and occasional […]