I discussed the Composable Commerce trend with Kelly Goetsch, the Chief Product Officer of commercetools. Composable architectures allow you to build the best possible commerce solution with the best possible shopping experience.
In response to a proposed law that requires technology companies to pay Australian publishers for linking to their news articles, Facebook made the sudden decision to restrict people and publishers from sharing news in Australia.
Facebook struggles to silence misinformation for years, but succeeds in silencing quality news in days. In both cases, Facebook's fast and loose approach continues to hurt millions of people ...
Social media platforms, news publishers, governments and internet users have been stuck in an inadequate equilibrium for years. The silver lining is that conflict is often necessary for driving positive changes.
My preferred outcome is that Australians "unfriend" Facebook, and switch back to reading real new websites.
Cory Doctorow is one of the most prolific bloggers in the world, capable of publishing multiple great posts a day. He recently documented his writing and publishing process. It's fascinating.
Over the last 20 years, Cory built a huge, personal database of thoughts, articles and links. He explains how his database simplifies and supports his writing process:
The memex I've created by thinking about and then describing every interesting thing I've encountered is hugely important for how I understand the world. It's the raw material of every novel, article, story and speech I write.
Inspired by Cory, I brought back the Notes section on my site. I will use Notes to document articles or ideas that grab my attention, but that I'm not ready to write a longer blog post about. I'll build my own memex with the goal to become a better writer.
Casey Winters writes about why marketing technology companies should change their target customer from marketers to engineers. Casey's blog post is guaranteed to generate some "ahas".
Tidelift, which provides organizations with commercial-grade support for Open Source software and pays part of the proceeds to software maintainers, raises a $25 million Series B. I hadn't heard about Tidelift before, but it turns out their office is 300 meters from Acquia's. I reached out and we're going to grab a coffee soon.
Google is moving the AMP project to an open governance model with a steering committee with representation from other organizations.
Success and failure are not polar opposites: you often need to endure failure to enjoy success. In Google's 2004 Founders' IPO Letter, Larry Page wrote:
We will not shy away from high-risk, high-reward projects because of short term earnings pressure. Some of our past bets have gone extraordinarily well, and others have not. Because we recognize the pursuit of such projects as the key to our long term success, we will continue to seek them out. For example, we would fund projects that have a 10% chance of earning a billion dollars over the long term. Do not be surprised if we place smaller bets in areas that seem very speculative or even strange when compared to our current businesses. Although we cannot quantify the specific level of risk we will undertake, as the ratio of reward to risk increases, we will accept projects further outside our current businesses, especially when the initial investment is small relative to the level of investment in our current businesses.
Think big and fail well — fail fast, fail often, and learn from your mistakes.
Today, I gave a keynote presentation at the 10th annual Design 4 Drupal conference at MIT. I talked about the past, present and future of JavaScript, and how this evolution reinforces Drupal's commitment to be API-first, not API-only. I also included behind-the-scene insights into the Drupal community's administration UI and JavaScript modernization initiative, and why this approach presents an exciting future for JavaScript in Drupal.
If you are interested in viewing my keynote, you can download a copy of my slides (256 MB).
Thank you to Design 4 Drupal for having me and happy 10th anniversary!
Keynoted at Frontend United in The Netherlands about our work on Drupal's web services APIs and our work toward a JavaScript-driven Drupal administration interface. Great event with lots of positive energy!
It was such a beautiful day at the Belgian coast that we decided to go on a bike ride. We ended up doing a 44 km (27 miles) ride that took us from the North Sea beach, through the dunes into the beautiful countryside around Bruges.
The photo shows the seemingly endless rows of poplar trees along a canal in Damme. The canal (left of the trees, not really visible in the photo) was constructed by Napoleon Bonaparte to enable the French army to move around much faster and to transport supplies more rapidly. At the time, canal boats were drawn by horses on roads alongside the canal. Today, many of these narrow roads have been turned into bike trails.