• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Simplicity Rules

Adam DuVander on keeping it simple

  • About Adam

Just 1% of My ProgrammableWeb Posts

February 27, 2023 by Adam DuVander

A couple of minutes after noon on February 27, 2009, I was sitting at the counter of Motore Coffee in Seattle. I was two months into writing my first book. The topic, mapping APIs, got me an introduction to John Musser, founder of ProgrammableWeb.

Less than a month later, John published my first post on his site. The first of 837 articles I eventually wrote following the rise of APIs. The meeting and my work at ProgrammableWeb was a turning point in my career, which now has me working with companies to better engage their technical audiences with content.

Earlier this month, the current owner of ProgrammableWeb redirected all of the traffic to a page that explains it’s been shut down. With the help of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, I went back to find some of my impactful posts, at least to me. In this post, I’ll share nine of those 837—a little over 1%, for those keeping track.

Rubbing Elbows with Siri and Popular Apps

Before Siri was the household name of Apple’s built-in voice assistant, it was an app. Thanks to connections I made at Wired and ProgrammableWeb’s stature as the API place, I got to use Siri under embargo.

The founders called it the “ultimate mashup” and walked me through all the APIs it used. Reading through my Siri coverage, it’s fun to see what came true with voice assistants and the distance they still have to go—the bit about making transactions sticks out to me.

The Siri news might have been my first ProgrammableWeb news embargo, where I had to keep quiet until a specific time we were allowed to publish. With several days heads up, I even created a video walkthrough. I swear the text on the screen was readable originally!

Another popular app with an API angle came later that year.

Instagram surged in usage in late fall 2010. Everyone was excited about the experience on their phones, but there was no other way to connect to your photo stream. There wasn’t even a web view at that point, meaning you couldn’t share outside the app.

It was limiting… and as they often do, a developer decided to build anyway.

Using a proxy, the dev reverse-engineered the private API used by Instagram’s app. Then he hosted documentation and a Ruby library on GitHub as a public service for other devs that wanted to build on Instagram.

I’m pretty sure this was a scoop, one I found from reading tweets about APIs. No other publications were picking up stories like this at that time. It meant I got to trade emails with Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom as I covered the story in follow-up posts. For several months, ProgrammableWeb owned the search results for “Instagram API.”

The biggest single day of traffic came from a post that took me seven or eight minutes to write. I was searching through Twitter again, reading every single tweet with “API” in it—that was possible at the time. My goal was to write a “Today in APIs” roundup of news, but one tweet jumped out to me as worthy of its own post:

Backend-as-a-service company Parse encouraged engineers to “apply via API,” sending their information in JSON rather than through a form or email. It was novel, it was fun, and the post instantly got attention.

A week later, Parse co-founder James Yu told me, “I felt like every mobile developer in the valley was probably talking about Parse that night.” A year later, Parse was part of Facebook. So was Instagram. The other popular app, Siri, was of course purchased and incorporated into Apple’s operating system.

Were these three successful because of their ProgrammableWeb coverage? Maybe so. 😉

Reporting on Data Only We Had Collected

It was fun to cover big news, creative apps, and other API-related topics. Even after joining full-time in 2010, it took some time for me to appreciate the directory side of the business. Looking back, the biggest opportunities at impactful, creative work were when I combined the news and the directory.

The first time I really dug into the data was when ProgrammableWeb approached 3,000 APIs. At the time it seemed like a huge number. Before the site shut down, there were more than 20,000 tracked. My 3,000 APIs post calls out API as a company, JSON, and internal usage as trends.

For years afterward, I’d see that hockey stick API growth chart in dozens of presentations at conferences. Several people told me they included it in fundraising decks.

It’s admittedly pretty nerdy, but I also really liked tracking the data formats supported by APIs. Again, this was data nobody else had, especially when you consider the value of historical data. We could look at formats by year, by API category, and any sort of combination we wanted to pull from the database.

I’m pretty sure the “bye XML” post was a collaboration with John after one of his talks. Everyone loved learning from directory insights and I wanted it to go beyond the few hundred people in the audience. Being the first audience for John’s analysis was also fun and taught me a lot about finding stories within trends.

Though I did a lot of trend-chasing at ProgrammableWeb, I also got to take on topics just because they were fun for me.

Following the Fun and Interesting Stories

Being editor of ProgrammableWeb meant I saw all sorts of news cross my desk each week. Most we couldn’t cover, a few topics got picked up by our freelancers, and I chose to follow a handful on my own. Before I joined full-time, I assume John did a lot of this filtering on his own. One of my favorites came early into my time as lead writer.

Firstly, it’s a pretty good headline. Mostly I love this post for the future possibilities it sees for APIs. It had access to store inventory, safe authentication to a customer’s cart, and even a way to make developers money. A grocery API was notable in 2009 and it seemed like a glimpse of what would be normal in just a few short years.

Possibility was also in the air the next year at SXSW. I was already attending, but the ProgrammableWeb connection also got me a press pass. I took my coverage seriously and spent a significant time under the Circus Mashimus tent.

Mashery had representatives from several of their customers in one room. In particular, the Best Buy DVD mashup sticks out: the company flew a developer out to talk about what he built with its API. This was precisely the ProgrammableWeb audience at the time, so I excitedly asked him to tell me his story, which I captured on video.

If I could have told stories like that every day, I would have. That developer excitement got me excited.

In fact, my very first post on ProgrammableWeb was about sharing something fun a local Portland developer created:

Twitter had become big just two years earlier at SXSW, so I used that example for a hashtag service I’d likely seen covered by Silicon Florist. “Tagalus,” now long gone, crowdsourced definitions of hashtags, still a fairly new concept. Not only did Tagalus use the Twitter API, but it also had its own API, making it a no-brainer topic for ProgrammableWeb.

The End: Part I

Just a few years later, I’d written 800-ish posts and ProgrammableWeb was searching for a buyer. I was ready for a change and was uncertain whether the publication could maintain its unbiased approach under an API management vendor.

I supported—and then reported—the Mulesoft acquisition, but did not join as an employee. I stayed on as a Contributing Editor for a year and wrote some great analyses with the agreement of my new employer, SendGrid.

Mulesoft’s stewardship of ProgrammableWeb was a pleasant surprise and it lasted a good long while. I’m obviously sorry to see the industry resource go and, personally, I no longer have an archive of my stories from that time.

Here are the nine mentioned in this post, in chronological order:

  1. Make Sense Of Confusing Twitter Hash Tags
  2. Eggs, Milk, Bread – The World’s First Grocery API
  3. “Ultimate Mashup” A Glimpse Into The Future
  4. DVD Collector Remixes Best Buy API to Share Compilation
  5. The Full-Featured, Unpublished Instagram API
  6. 3,000 Web APIs: Trends From A Quickly Growing Directory
  7. 1 In 5 APIs Say “Bye XML”
  8. Jobseekers Invited To “Apply Via API”
  9. ProgrammableWeb Joins MuleSoft

And 828 others on the archive of my profile page.

A Simple Personal Portal

March 5, 2022 by Adam DuVander

Recently I pushed a new, streamlined version of my personal website. Not this one, which bears my name, but the shorter, dot-org-ier version of the username I choose if I’m early enough—which, these days, I’m usually not.

Part of me was looking for a tiny creative project. But it was important that it be pretty darn small, as I was just looking to get something together in the margins of the weekend.

What’s a simple website look like in 2022? I couldn’t get the retro constraints of 8 bit out of my mind, so I ended up with this:

My “web designer” days are far behind me so I went looking for an existing theme. Instead, I found some nostalgic CSS styles. It didn’t include layout and using a framework for a tiny page seemed overkill. So, I went retro here, too: I swiped HTML from the demo page with some old-fashioned View Source.

Somewhere along the line, I bumped into a blog post by the creator of these NES.css styles. Their primary motivation was kismet:

I like simple

That was my email signature for a long time and certainly behind the naming of Simplicity Rules®.

Why adamd.org Needed a Change

In fact, it was an email signature that sent me off to cobble together this new, 8 bit personal portal. Most of my online profiles now point to my business site. Recently, in an effort to get “business conversations” in the right inbox, I switched out to a more personal signature for personal email… which led me to visit adamd.org.

Its small digital footprint was crumbling:

  • An embedded video was broken
  • It used an old business logo
  • My “professional timeline” stopped in 2018
  • There was no mention of my latest book

Worse yet, there was a section titled “What I actually do” that went on to not describe very well what I actually do now.

Oops.

Rather than replace every section of the old site, I used the two simplicity paths to arrive at the core of what’s needed today. I’m calling the new site a personal portal because it mostly points out to other places to find me on the web. It;s there as a snapshot of my most important projects right now.

As a writer, I think in word counts. The new site only includes 126 words. If I had more time, I might try to cut that down some more, as I’m sure Mark Twain would have written on his website.

And… What Else is New?

One of the projects on this new personal portal really deserved its own post here. Alas, at this point I’ve buried the lede…

I wrote another book!

Published in May 2021, Developer Marketing Does Not Exist shares the philosophy behind my work. More importantly, it’s helped over 1,000 marketers reach more of the right developers. It was covered by Nordic APIs and Techcrunch.

A book a decade, I joked. Map Scripting 101, now out of print unless you count the five copies I still have, was published in August 2010. It received much more “coverage” on this here site.

Even by 2010 things on the web had changed. Social networks became the way we shared the latest. Blogs, which started as personal endeavors, became businesses… and businesses added blogs.

In 2007, I lamented that the personal website had disappeared. The hand-crafted, HTML playgrounds became templatized and themed. And I wrote those laments on a blog that was sterile by comparison.

Forgetting to note new achievements like books, jobs, and—I dunno—children is one sign of how both adamd.org and adamduvander.com haven’t kept up with changes. That may remain the case, but at least for now, both have some version of my latest news.

Simply put, that’s good enough for now.

It’s Been 668 Days

March 5, 2022 by Adam DuVander

This is one of those classic personal blog posts.

Here’s the structure:

  1. I point out how long it’s been since my last post
  2. I apologize for the inconvenience to you
  3. I promise to do better in the future

I’m going to buck the trend and only do #1.

It’s Not an Abberation, It’s a Pattern

Yes, there have been 668 days since my last post, which was kind of a joke about the glue of the internet. Those 668 days, for those who are keeping track of such things, set a record. This current gap, which ends today with this post, surpassed the previous record by 181 days.

The last record was set in 2016 and its gap stretched back into 2015. I have been not writing on this blog for a long time.

Look, I made a chart:

Those first five years were prolific, but I explained that in a different chart in a post from 2015. I blamed it on the cobbler problem since writing blog posts has been some part of my professional capacity for years now.

The days between posts have expanded. In the last five years, I have written here 11 times. On average, that’s 178 days between posts. That’s about two posts a year, which is more than I would have guessed.

But things are about to get crazy.

Bursts Used to Be the Norm

I might not be sticking to the structure of the first-post-in-awhile post, but I am keeping the spirit intact. There’s already been one self-referential chart. Another is on the way.

During some time when I could have written a meaningful post, I reviewed the data for my personal blog. Something about the days between posts numbers jumped out at me: not only did I blog more frequently at one point, but I also used to publish multiple posts on the same day.

There were 61 days from 2005 to 2007 that I wrote two posts. The next year, it happened twice.

And then: a long, long drought. More than a decade.

Those with a keen eye for chart-reading will notice there were multiple posts published on the same day in 2022. Since this post broke a streak of almost two years between posts, it seems impossible.

Your omniscient narrator knows something you don’t.

I’m Not Sorry and I’m Not Changing

I’d originally planned a different post to share some news and poke fun at the plight of personal websites. But curiosity about the time between posts got the best of me and next thing you know, I’d made charts.

So, now I’ve gone to great lengths to point out how long it’s been since my last post.

But I haven’t apologized for the inconvenience to you. And I won’t. Because I hope you haven’t been reloading this page for 668 days.

I also haven’t promised to do better in the future. In fact, I showed data that suggests I’m more likely to do worse in the future.

Now…

Remember that different post I was going to share before I got distracted by this meta-post? The reason I’m confident enough to include same-day data in 2022 is I’ve already written that post. Through the magic of editing, I’ll include a link to it here once I’ve published it.

But please remember: just because I’ve published twice in one day for the first time since April 22, 2008, does not mean I’ve promised to do better in the future. And I’m not sorry about that.

The Glue of the Internet

May 6, 2020 by Adam DuVander

Have you heard about the glue of the Internet? It is many things. I am the glue of the Internet. You are the glue of the Internet.

IF PHP IS THE GLUE OF THE INTERNET THEN FACEBOOK HAVE BEEN SNIFFING IT PRETTY HARD LATELY HA

— PHP CEO (@PHP_CEO) March 25, 2014

I do have a history of noticing cliches. So, when I came upon this one again, I had to etch it in stone for eternity right here on this blog.

Those Sticky, Sticky APIs

I’ve written about APIs for over a decade, so before publishing a post like this, I had to confirm I’ve never called them the glue of the Internet. Google says I haven’t.

I have spoken at GlueCon, a fantastic developer conference that is in its 11th year. If I had to guess, its name is slightly tongue-in-cheek, which shows how long this has been a cliche.

APIs are the glue of the Internet, said Spanish multinational bank BBVA in 2016. More recently, Open Banking initiatives have hammered home its gluey status, as American Banker declared in 2019.

Software testers are often working with black boxes. So, let’s hope the glue dries clear when they’re testing APIs. Because APIs are the glue of the Internet.

They’re also the glue of many other things. APIs have a lot they’re holding together!

That’s a Hard iPaaS

Truth be told, this post was inspired by Integromat, an integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS). I’ll just leave a screenshot of its home page here:

Integromat is the glue of the Internet?

For two years, I worked at Zapier, a competitor that predates Integromat. I may be biased, but I found plenty of examples (this being the oldest) declaring that Zapier is the glue of the Internet.

On the other hand, Zeleo invites you to glue the Internet together.

And, to be fair, TechCrunch declared IFTTT to be the Internet Glue Service in 2014.

The Elmer’s of Protocols

APIs and iPaaS are nothing compared to the series of tubes the Internet is built upon.

BGP is the glue of the Internet, according to a 2012 Cloudflare post recapping Google downtime. Border Gateway Protocol, as it’s known formally, determines Internet routes.

Indeed, network interconnection points are the glue of the Internet, as declared over 20 years ago in an article that also mentions long distance phone services and dial-up Internet.

A little farther up the stack, you bet that HTTP is the glue of the Internet. Or is TCP/IP the glue of the Internet? Or maybe Sendmail and FTP?

Keeping up the Paste

There are so many other things that may be the glue of the Internet, it’s really hard to keep track.

Dan Gilmour said that links are the glue of the Internet. But Rhett Allain said link aggregators are the glue of the Internet. Why not both?

Speaking of memes, another site claimed that memes are the glue of the Internet. I’m not linking the site because it also wanted me to download Flash and then forwarded me to an advertiser’s site before I could cancel it.

But I appreciate the sentiment: with Internet as the glue of our everyday lives, the glue of the Internet should move beyond the technical bits. It’s not just APIs, protocols, and integration tools.

It’s the sorts of stuff that everybody can appreciate. If it’s not memes, maybe photobombs are the glue of the Internet?

Let me know what’s gluing your Internet together.

The Possibility and Pressure of a Blank Slate

January 7, 2019 by Adam DuVander

10 years ago I stared at an empty OpenOffice document. The cursor blinked expectantly.

It was early January, 2009, I had inked a book deal, and was frozen. My proposal included a complete outline, so it’s not like I didn’t know what to write.

There’s some comfort in an empty document, the italicized Untitled filename can still become anything. With a blank slate, there is only possibility.

I rationalized that maybe I shouldn’t start with chapter one. It’s like a persuasive essay where you write the introduction last so you can foreshadow the argument you’ve already made. That makes a lot less sense for a programming cookbook, but I moved on to chapter two.

It didn’t get easier. All I could think about was how permanent the words would be, printed into 5,000 copies. Nevermind that it would be 18 months later and that I’d have at least five opportunities to change every word, sentence, and code sample.

I felt the pressure of the possibility.

Possibilities are Endless with a Blank Slate

Fresh starts are nice. Despite the pressures of writer’s block, the truth was the blinking cursor was all possibility. As I write this, it’s the first week of 2019. A new year. Resolutions abound as people optimistically look out at the possibility of a blank slate.

There is potential energy stored up in anything new: freshly fallen snow, a beautiful wedding cake, or electronics straight from their packaging, that static plastic film still covering the screen. Unfortunately, none of those things fulfill their purpose left in their pristine state. The electronics should be used, the wedding cake should be cut (and eaten!) and that snow should be trod upon by hefty winter boots.

Most new things are concepts rather than physical things. Semesters in school—then quarters in business—each bring new possibilities. Monday is the start of a new week and every single day (so far) the sun rises. Even a washed car and full tank of gas hold inspiring potential.

You don’t need to wait for some milestone (like January 1), you can make your own newness. My friend Mike Vardy advocates starting the new year whenever you want. Because of his influence, I’m 12 weeks into training for a 5K rather than starting with the calendar year.

Making newness means you’re manufacturing possibility. That feels great, but comes with the responsibility of moving toward that potential. For me, that responsibility means I’m also manufacturing pressure, the same sort that had me staring at the blinking cursor 10 years ago.

Pressures Increase when the Slate Remains Blank

Here’s where the internal dialogue starts: I’ve written the section above, but this one is empty. That’s a lot of pressure. I’m happy with this post so far. What if I screw it up? But if I never write anything, the post will never be finished.

Some people spend years in the state of possibility. It’s like the old calculation of an idea’s value. The execution is what’s valuable and the idea is a multiplier. The idea is the possibility, and it’s much more comfortable than taking action. When you execute, you might find it’s harder than you thought, and you might feel the pressure of a reality mismatched with the fiction of possibility.

It was almost three years ago that I decided I should be a runner. I knew there were programs that started slowly with a mix of running and walking. Putting shoes to pavement is the ultimate reality check. It was much easier to imagine having done it than to do it. Two years passed. On my birthday in 2018, I created an event page for the following year, but never published it. Finally, six months later, I laced up my shoes and ran a couple blocks.

When you start turning the possibility into reality, the pressure should decrease. The build up of potential energy is translated into action. At the same time, and this can be hard, the possibility also decreases. This thing you’re doing is becoming real. It may not match what you imagined. But your working on it is the only thing that fulfills its potential.

For me, after awhile of taking action on the newness, once it stops feeling new, another blank slate appears in my mind. It’s the one that imagines that others will really love it or really hate it. It’s a cycle and it includes new possibilities, which means new pressures. And the only way around that is more action: launching, sharing, or whatever it is that will move that reaction from possibility to reality.

Will You Ever Write Another Book?

This post started as a way to commemorate the 10 year anniversary of a huge project about which I’m proud. Even if technology, as it inevitably would, has made my book a bit outdated, I can always say I wrote the book on map scripting (primarily because that’s a term I made up!).

When that 18 month process came to a close with the book’s publication in 2010, I was often asked whether I’d write another book. At the time I expressed uncertainty. There’s a lot to gain from writing one book (it’s the reason for my current career path), but the jump to two-time author is seemingly less impactful.

It’s been awhile since someone asked me, but my ol’ blog buddy Mike Duffy posted on Facebook and I found myself responding: “Always maybe.”

If I wrote another book, I’d definitely remember what I learned last time: write it in the margins of work and focus on progress every day. But I’d also look to share more sooner, to tighten that possibility and pressure cycle.

Recently I came across Kelly Miller’s 30 day book project. From October 1 to November 1, Kelly moved the project forward, from outlining, to writing, to editing. And she has an epic Twitter thread where she checked in every day with progress.

Regardless of whether it’s writing a book, I think we can all learn from that approach to the projects that matter to us. As the possibility turns to pressure, remember that forward progress both relieves the pressure and brings your efforts into reality.

  • Page 1
  • Page 2
  • Page 3
  • …
  • Page 85
  • Next Page »

Simplicity Series

  • Designing the Obvious
  • Paradox of Choice
  • Laws of Simplicity

Copyright © 2025 · Elevate on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in