Bruno Pedro

Startups

Wed, 03 Sep 2025 17:07:25 +0200

Seedcamp (LP): Europe’s seed fund, 2023–now
Blokness (Advisor): Reliable, real-time NFT data, 2022–now
Nubentos (Investor): the API Marketplace For Health, 2020–2023
Landbot (Advisor): A SaaS platform that enables companies to create memorable conversational experiences, 2019–2021
Fleksy (Advisor): The easiest and fastest content access while typing on a mobile device, 2018–2019
Hitch (co-founder and CTO): A single platform to help API owners engage with and grow their API community, 2016–2017
[API Changelog][3] (co-founder and CTO): API documentation monitoring and notification, 2015–2017
Nubera (CTO): the company behind GetApp and CloudWork, 2012–2014 (acquired by Gartner in 2015)
[tarpipe][4] (co-founder): a publishing mediation and distribution platform, 2008–2012 (acquired by Nubera)
[JobTide][5] (founder): a job aggregator and search engine, 2006–2011 (acquired by AdClick)
eth: a consulting and Web development company in south Portugal, 1999–2002

Open-source Projects

Mon, 10 Jun 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Open-source projects #

postman-openapi-sync, 2021–now
express-glitch-keepalive, 2018–now
node-fs, 2011–now
intercom-php, 2013–2014
Horde Template compilation code (used by the IMP Webmail Client), November 2006
PEAR Auth_Container_SOAP, 2003–now
ProFTPD Quota LDAP Module, May 2003
phdwait (PHP Database Web Application Toolkit), September 2002

Translating user benefits into API capabilities

Tue, 01 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This post was originally published on the Postman blog as “Translating user benefits into API capabilities”. The original content was professionally edited.

As part of my ongoing work designing the Postman Open Technologies Knowledge Base API, I have identified most of the technical characteristics of the API. Now I need to define the capabilities that the API will offer.

I’ve been following our internal API design playbook, which covers the strategy, definition, validation, and specification. I already finished the strategy step by documenting the user personas, interviewing potential API users, and identifying the API architectural style. I’m still in the API definition phase, where I’m defining the API’s capabilities. When I say “capabilities,” I’m referring to the functionality that the API will offer to fulfill the needs of potential users. A capability can be reduced to a feature or a set of features, depending on its complexity.

How to choose between REST vs. GraphQL vs. gRPC vs. SOAP

Thu, 29 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This post was originally published on the Postman blog as “How to choose between REST vs. GraphQL vs. gRPC vs. SOAP”. The original content was professionally edited.

To create the Postman Open Technologies Knowledge Base API, I’ve been following our team’s internal API design playbook, which covers the strategy, definition, validation, and specification of an API. After finishing the strategy phase by interviewing potential API users, I’m now in the definition phase, where the goal is to document what the API will offer.

What I learned from interviewing potential users before designing an API

Wed, 31 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This post was originally published on the Postman blog as “What I learned from interviewing potential users before designing an API”. The original content was professionally edited.

I’ve been working on the Postman Open Technologies Knowledge Base project with the goal of implementing the Knowledge Base API. I’ve followed the API design steps we use internally: strategy, definition, validation, and specification. This blog post explores my journey through the strategy step, particularly the part where I interview API stakeholders. The output of the strategy step consists of findings and evidence that back the importance of building the API, and interviewing stakeholders provides key information that I use to reinforce the value of the API. Keep reading to learn more—and stay tuned for a follow-up post that goes into greater detail about how I identified the architectural style of the API by learning from users what tools they use.

Build a successful API by understanding user personas

Tue, 16 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This post was originally published on the Postman blog as “Build a successful API by understanding user personas”. The original content was professionally edited.

Postman Open Technologies Knowledge Base is a new project with the goal of providing insights from a vast amount of information about APIs available on the internet. One of the project’s objectives is to provide an API that consumers can use to retrieve information from the Knowledge Base. The result? As part of my work on the Postman Open Technologies team, I have been building the Knowledge Base API.

How to build an API-centric AI platform

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 10:34:04 +0100

OpenAI’s approach with their plugins strategy is a lesson to every founder trying to build a platform. OpenAI announced their ChatGPT plugins offer on March 23, 2023. Their announcement blog post says they “are gradually rolling out plugins in ChatGPT so we can study their real-world use, impact, and safety and alignment challenges.” They’re launching the plugin platform with several third parties, including Wolfram and Zapier.

Let’s see how OpenAI has evolved to reach the point where it’s now becoming a platform. It started as something that you could “play with” to chat with a bot that would answer questions, remember? OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022 to get its AI engine in front of as many people as possible. By launching something far from perfect, they started gaining knowledge about what people really wanted from an AI-powered chat system. As more people were using the chat system, OpenAI evolved it by fixing bugs, making it faster, adding layers of feedback loops, and, most importantly, learning their “product holes” (more on that later).

Calendar-Based API Versioning

Thu, 01 Dec 2022 18:57:41 +0100

Tim Rogers, a Product Manager at GitHub, recently announced that they are moving from incremental API versioning to something they’re calling “calendar-based.” The announcement explains what calendar-based versioning is and why GitHub is adopting it now. Calendar-based versioning allows GitHub to introduce breaking changes regularly without upsetting API consumers. Consumers won’t get mad because they can pin their requests to a particular API version, so they’re sure it won’t contain any breaking changes.

Event-driven Feature Development

Wed, 19 Oct 2022 11:20:00 +0200

Sharing information between different features can be done in a synchronous or asynchronous fashion. Following an asynchronous communication style doesn’t mean that you’re sharing events. You can, for instance, pass commands between features. By doing so, you’re creating a strong functional dependency between features. To avoid that, you should instead share information about things that happened, or events. By sharing events, you create opportunities for other features to become more relevant to users while acting independently.

API User Experience

Sun, 22 Nov 2020 18:00:00 +0200

API User Experience or, in short, APIUX is the experience that any user interacting with your API will feel. It includes not only the developers writing code that integrates with your API but also end users that are using your API indirectly through third-party applications. As you will see, the way you design your API has a profound impact in the way even end users experience an application that consumes your API.

The illusion of immediacy

Mon, 05 Oct 2020 16:00:00 +0200

Immediacy is a concept that is often not easy to grasp. Most people think of immediacy as something related to what is happening around them when, in fact, the main factor of immediacy is that they are actively involved. Immediacy is considered to be the direct and instant involvement with something. Being involved with something means that you are also participating and possibly affecting the behavior of your experience. I believe the detail of being involved with is crucial as it distinguishes immediacy from any “spectator sport” where you would be merely watching and not interacting with the situation. Immediacy provides a sense of integration with the situation you’re experiencing, making you feel that time stops. The only thing you are doing is absorbing the experience without any contextual boundaries.

A world of messages

Tue, 16 Jun 2020 18:00:00 +0200

The world is full of messages, but we don’t realize that until we stop long enough to pay attention. How so? Look at how people interact with each other. What are they doing and saying? How are they communicating? Are they expecting some sort of feedback from one another?

Humans are hardwired to expect others to communicate using messages. Even though most of our communication is non-verbal, messages take up the most substantial part of the way we humans convey meaning. Some messages are short-lived, and people expect a reaction to them within seconds. Other messages are very long-lived and might take days or weeks to reach their destination. The senders of those messages don’t expect a reply to happen quickly. Sometimes a response is not even expected at all.

Platforms are communities

Wed, 26 Feb 2020 18:15:00 +0200

The platform economy is growing more robust than ever. According to McKinsey, in 2025, digital platforms will be accountable for over 30% of the whole economy. In their 2018 article, they mention that by 2025 “an emerging set of digital ecosystems could account for more than $60 trillion in revenue.” However, only about 3% of global companies have already adopted a platform strategy. The big players are not sleeping and have already been investing in building their platforms. Companies like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft already have their businesses on top of platform models. Overall, platforms are already driving seven of the most valuable companies in the world. It’s clear that the platform economy is a critical driver in business growth. Companies that haven’t yet adopted a platform business model should be making their move sooner rather than later. So, what exactly is a platform?

Enabling a two-sided market

Mon, 16 Dec 2019 17:15:00 +0200

If you’re building or growing a platform business, you will face the challenge of understanding how you can enable a two-sided market. Two-sided markets are important because they are the engines that will make your platform grow without your intervention.

(…) for a platform business, user commitment and active usage, not sign-ups or acquisitions, are the true indicators of customer adoption. That’s why platforms must attract users by structuring incentives for participation—preferably incentives that are organically connected to the interactions made possible by the platform.—Choudary, Sangeet Paul, “Platform Revolution”, p. 85.

Happiness at work

Thu, 05 Sep 2019 15:50:00 +0200

What makes you really happy about your work? I ask this question during most of my interviews. Candidates feel surprised with the question and try their best to express what really makes them happy about work. I like to think that I ask that question so I can better understand them and, especially, what drives them. That way I can decide if they are a fit for what I’m looking for and, if so, how I can set them up for success from the get-go.

Non-technical API Design

Tue, 27 Aug 2019 15:41:49 +0200

Yesterday I published a tweet asking people that consider themselves API Designers what their job consists of. It’s interesting to see that I’ve got a bunch of answers but not the ones I was looking for. The thing to note is that most people who believe they work in API Design are actually working on technical API definition, not on designing the API from the ground up. Their job primarily consists of making sure that the API is well defined and documented from a technical point of view. They measure their success by how easy developers understand and start using the APIs that they’re defining.

What are Web APIs

Wed, 08 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post was originally published on Hacker Noon as “What are Web APIs”. In this article, I will introduce you broadly to the topic of Web APIs. I will start by explaining what APIs are, how they evolved into Web APIs, and how developers like yourself can use them. Then we will outline the history of Web APIs along the numerous different approaches that took place over the years.

5 steps to API frustration

Thu, 19 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This article is a satire that describes what often happens to developers that are looking for an API and want to integrate with it. I’m pretty sure that some of the things have happened to you at some point in time. If you’re an API provider, you should think hard about how you’re dealing with the five topics that I’m about to expose.

1. Search #

It all starts with search. You want to find an API that can offer you a particular feature. You also want to be able to integrate your software with it quickly. You don’t have time to implement things yourself, and that’s the main reason why you’re looking for an API that does the job for you. Most of the times you look around, but you can’t find anything that suits your needs.

API Friction

Wed, 18 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

The concept of friction in products and applications is not something new and can be experienced by almost everyone. Product friction is represented by all the barriers and difficulties people find when trying to use a product.

Every Web site that makes you fill in a form, or wait for a confirmation e-mail, or take some test to prove that you are human is adding friction — and losing sales. — Pogue, 2012

Growing your business with an API

Tue, 17 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This article summarizes a talk I recently gave at the Nordic APIs Platform Summit in Stockholm, Sweden. The full title of the presentation is “Growing your business with an API: how to measure your success” and it explores the idea that you should be able to measure how your API is contributing to your business revenue.

Introduction #

How can you grow your business revenue by using APIs? In this article, you will understand the concept of “Integrated Product” and how it can help you reach product-market fit and generate revenue. You will also learn how to effectively measure the success of your API and its integrations with multiple third parties. By the end, you’ll be able to identify which parts of your API need improvement, which are the ones driving revenue, and the ones that should be deprecated.

Interfaces

Wed, 04 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

What is an interface? Is it something that a user sees on a screen? Is it the border between different elements? Is it a way to get to some other place?

An interface is the common boundary of two entities. It’s the place where independent entities communicate with each other.

Interface. A common boundary of two entities.

Interfaces are everywhere. When you walk and feel the floor beneath your feet there’s an interface between your body and the floor. When you talk to someone, your voice is the interface between yourself and the other person.

GraphQL: 3 reasons not to use it

Thu, 03 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post was originally published on the Hitch blog as “GraphQL: 3 reasons not to use it”. GraphQL is a query language created by Facebook in 2012. Its purpose is to describe the capabilities and requirements of data models for client-server applications. Facebook has been using GraphQL ever since and it has been open sourced in 2015. Its specification is evolving in the form of a Draft RFC.

The primary motivation to create GraphQL was that, according to Lee Byron, Facebook “started with a system that looked a lot like a traditional RESTful server but found it difficult to use as iOS developers, and saw conflict between the desire to load all information in a single round trip while keeping REST resources well isolated.”

Machine-readable API Discovery

Wed, 13 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

API Discovery is the process of finding the right API that meets your needs. What is the best way to automate it? Machine-readable definitions let your software discover which APIs to use. One such definition format is APIs.json. It lets you group several APIs together and point to other machine-readable documents. Each of those documents defines things such as pricing, license agreements, and provisioning options.

Do you want to know more how machine-readable formats help with different types of automation? Check out this presentation about How to Automate API Discovery.

Complexity in Microservices

Wed, 02 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

As you add microservices to your stack, the number of connections follows Metcalfe’s law. In the simplest case, there’s just a single connection between two services. As you reach five services, connections can happen in 10 different ways. A stack with twenty services has 190 possible connections. The complexity of managing, supporting, and understanding those connections is something you should consider as your stack grows.

Complexity in Microservices. The number of connections between microservices follows Metcalfe’s law: $n \cdot \frac{(n-1)}{2}$.

Have you ever faced complexity in microservices yourself? Learn more about it with this presentation about Asynchronous Microservices.

API Testing Complexity

Thu, 25 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000

You can think of API testing as a mix of different strategies, each having its own purpose. Unit testing is all about making sure that your code consumes the API in a reliable way. Functional, or black box testing, lets you know how the API replies to specific requests. Load testing follows the functional testing patterns making repeated API calls, measuring response times.

API Testing Complexity. API testing complexity increases the deeper you go.

Are there any tools that help you manage your API testing? Find more information at this presentation on How to Automate API Testing.

Latency in Microservices

Wed, 24 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Generally speaking, you can define latency as the time delay between the cause and the effect of some change in the system being observed. In a point to point communication, you calculate latency as the time it takes to get a response from the system. When you involve many services in a single workflow then the latency is the sum of all the response times.

Latency in Microservices. Latency is the sum of all response times: $L=\sum_0^n t_n$.

How can you avoid latency in microservices? Learn more about it with this presentation about Asynchronous Microservices.

API Lifecycle Operations Stage

Fri, 17 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post was originally published on the Nordic APIs blog as “API Lifecycle Operations Stage: Marketing Your API”. By reading this article you’ll understand what factors make up the API Lifecycle Operations Stage, and how you should address them. Transforming your API into something developers will want to consume, and learning what impact this will have on your business are things we’ll consider at this stage. Other critical actions involve maintaining a positive relationship with your API audience and offering the appropriate support channels.

API Lifecycle Development Stage

Fri, 10 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post was originally published on the Nordic APIs blog as “API Lifecycle Development Stage: Deploying Your API”. During the course of this article, you’ll come to understand the actions to take as well as the most important challenges to address during an API’s Development phase. We’ll consider what implementation options are available and explore API Management and why it matters. We’ll define API Usability and why it’s important, and we’ll consider what immediate steps to take after your API is deployed.

Common Cases When Using SOAP Makes Sense

Mon, 02 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post was originally published on the Nordic APIs blog as “Common Cases When Using SOAP Makes Sense”. These days when discussing web APIs, a RESTful approach is usually assumed. While this modern architectural paradigm is often used, it isn’t always the best tact depending on the job at hand. The fact is that SOAP is still being used quite a lot today. While not all problems can be elegantly solved with SOAP, it may still be the best choice in some specific situations. Crazy talk? It’s true!

Using Templates for Documentation Driven API Design

Thu, 19 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post was originally published on the Nordic APIs blog as “Using Templates for Documentation Driven API Design”. As an API provider it’s important to consider how consumers interact with your API. While most people leave this task to the very end, API design should, in fact, begin with clear and concise documentation. This practice is often called “Documentation Driven Design” or “Documentation Driven Development” and is followed by many practitioners around the world. Tom Preston-Werner, founder of GitHub, clearly outlines some advantages of this approach:

Is REST better than SOAP? Yes, in Some Use Cases

Fri, 30 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post was originally published on the Nordic APIs blog as “Is REST better than SOAP? Yes, in Some Use Cases”. What is REST? What about SOAP? Why were they created and what are their main features? What makes them different, and when should you use one or the other? We gave an overview of REST vs. SOAP in our recent infographic, but this post delves deeper. Read on for answers to these questions and for an explanation about which use cases lend themselves to a RESTful approach and where SOAP is preferable.

Designing APIs for Machines

Thu, 27 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post was originally published on the Nordic APIs blog as “Designing APIs for Machines”. The number of Internet-connected devices is growing at an astonishing rate. According to Cisco, in 2012, there were about 8.7 billion connected devices! In 2013 alone more than 280 thousand new devices were connected every hour, on average. This year, that number grew to more than 360 thousand new devices per hour. Cisco predicts that six years from now there will be more than 50 billion total connected devices making this new mesh the largest available network ever.

Designing APIs for Humans

Mon, 17 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post was originally published on the Nordic APIs blog as “Designing APIs for Humans”. One of the most discussed topics at this year’s NordicAPIs Platform Summit was API Design and how it can affect the way APIs are consumed. The discussions focussed on how design might affect the end users’ perception of your product. A number of speakers considered this a very important topic, and several discussions occurred throughout the event. According to Jason Harmon, Head of API Design at PayPal, “APIs are starting to look more like the product and less like the technology.” In other words, API Design is starting to look more and more like User Experience (UX), and less like a simple technical mapping of your app’s database.

How to stay ahead of third-party API changes

Wed, 05 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post was originally published on the ZDNet Service Oriented blog as “How to stay ahead of third-party API changes”. While most developers know that APIs change all the time, those changes aren’t communicated as often or as clearly as they should. Usually you only find out about what changed when it’s already too late – and the only choice you have is to react by adapting your integration with the API that changed.

How to Spark API Adoption With Good Documentation Practices

Tue, 04 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post was originally published on the Nordic APIs blog as “How to Spark API Adoption With Good Documentation Practices”. While almost everyone seems to agree that documentation is of key importance when launching an API, little is said about how it can actually affect API adoption. Jeffrey Hammond, a Principal Analyst at Forrester, claims that “adoption patterns are shifting towards developers,” giving them the power to “block or aid the adoption of software.” This means that a significant way to persuade decision makers to choose your software over your competitors’ is to gain the trust and confidence of developers.

How to Release a Free API and Get Paid Indirectly

Fri, 31 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post was originally published on the Nordic APIs blog as “How to Release a Free API and Get Paid Indirectly”. API-related business models usually involve a customer actively paying to use the API itself. But consider this: What if you could allow anyone to use your API freely while you retain the power to generate revenue from it? And what if by doing so, you could actually increase your chances of generating even more revenue?

How to Achieve Accelerated Growth with APIs

Tue, 21 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post was originally published on the Nordic APIs blog as “How to Achieve Accelerated Growth with APIs”. Growth is a word on every entrepreneur’s mind, especially when it’s associated with the value of a startup, or with how much profit it can generate. Most startups struggle, and apply many different techniques, to reach a point where they can show some growth.

This article shows you how growth can be measured, and what variables you can use to control it. It also shows you a different way of achieving higher than usual growth. You can do this by combining traditional customer acquisition channels with an API, and making third-party developers the focus of your business marketing.

API Design & Testing State of the Art

Thu, 16 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post was originally published on the Nordic APIs blog as “API Design & Testing State of the Art”. Ensuring proper APIs functionality raises all the following questions:

How do you decide which endpoints you’re going to expose with your API?
How do you create all the documentation that developers will use to interact with your API?
What is the best way to verify that your API is working as specified by the documentation, and in keeping with the developer’s expectations?
Who should be involved in modelling APIs inside your organization?

By the time you finish reading this article you should be able to answer all these questions. API design and testing are very hot spaces right now. This is because they are the primary means of guaranteeing that APIs not only reflect business processes, but are being used in a way that will generate value to both consumers and providers.

5 Reasons Why Developers are not Using your API

Fri, 03 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post was originally published on the Nordic APIs blog as “5 Reasons Why Developers are not Using your API”. Have you launched your API and are you having a hard time understanding why it’s not being used as much as you anticipated? You’ve followed all the best practices, used all the latest technologies and have made sure it is always up and running. For some reason developers are not using your API, and its usage is not increasing over time.

Should you Control How your Public API is Used?

Wed, 01 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post was originally published on the Nordic APIs blog as “Should you Control How your Public API is Used?”. The more open your public API is the more developers will implement different types of applications. Some of these, however, might be ones that you would prefer not to be associated with your brand. What is the right balance between openness and governance? Should you relinquish some control to get some more users? Should you worry about how your API is being consumed? How much can you control access without losing interest from talented, outside innovators? Read on to find answers to these and other questions!

How to Monetize Your API

Mon, 01 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post was originally published on the Nordic APIs blog as “How to Monetize Your API”. You’ve spent countless hours working on your new API. You followed all the standards and best practices. You executed an API-first strategy. You listened to your app’s users and to developers. You were careful to include the features they needed. One thing you have not yet figured out though is how you will make money with your API!

5 Ways APIs will Increase your Revenue

Wed, 27 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post was originally published on the Nordic APIs blog as “5 Ways APIs will Increase your Revenue”. What is the most important thing your business needs? Cash! And how do you get cash? Customers! Without customers, there is no revenue, and the ability to acquire customers is what distinguishes a successful business from a failing one.

In this article, I will show you five ways to increase your business revenue by offering an API that third-party developers can use to build apps and consume your information. These are not the typical API business models. Instead, these are ways to make money with or without an API. What I will show you though is that these models deliver more value if executed with an API. Let me start by showing how you can increase your business revenue by acquiring more customers using an API as an inbound funnel.

Product Hunt, The Popular Tech Product Discovery Site, Is In Current Y Combinator Batch

Thu, 17 Jul 2014 15:35:52 +0000

Is Product Hunt the next big thing?

My first job

Wed, 25 Sep 2013 20:37:06 +0000

An old friend just sent me a scan of the business card of my first job.

Thanks!

Melon Bruño

Thu, 22 Aug 2013 17:19:21 +0000

Bridging the Gap Between APIs and Customers

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 11:15:59 +0000

I recently gave a talk at the APIdays Mediterranea in Madrid where I started with a question: “Who are your customers?”.

The single, most important thing you want to understand about your API is how you can generate revenue from it. It all depends on who your customers are and how they can obtain value through your API.

What customers need is represented in one of the slides as the “API Hierarchy of Needs”, an adaptation of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to the context of APIs from a customer point of view.

Sun

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 15:04:15 +0000

Still using HTTP Basic Auth?

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 15:22:17 +0000

Great article by Steve Graham about why you should stop using HTTP Basic Auth immediately!

As well as being tremendously simple, HTTP Basic by itself is also tremendously insecure, i.e. it is implemented by simply Base64 encoding the username and password concatenated with a colon “:” character. It then follows that HTTP Basic should only be used, if at all, over securely encrypted connections.

Original article: WHY THE HELL DOES YOUR API STILL USE HTTP BASIC AUTH?

Who’s using your API?

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 14:13:58 +0000

“Who’s using your API” was the title of my presentation at the API Strategy & Practice Conference that happened on February 21 and 22, 2013 in New York City.

One of the conference takeaways was the concern that almost everybody had with their customers. Almost everyone I talked with was in one way or another worried about how the API distribution model is affecting the way their customers interact with their app.

Montserrat

Sat, 02 Mar 2013 15:36:15 +0000

American boy

Sun, 17 Feb 2013 12:07:42 +0000

Interesting art by Eulalia, at the MACBA museum in Barcelona.

What is an empty XML element?

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 19:40:56 +0000

Following a very enthusiastic discussion today at work, here’s the proper definition of an empty XML element, according to the W3C Recommendation of 26 November 2008:

[Definition: An element with no content is said to be empty.] The representation of an empty element is either a start-tag immediately followed by an end-tag, or an empty-element tag. – Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 (Fifth Edition) § “Content of Elements”

Kung Hei Fat Choi

Sun, 10 Feb 2013 19:46:41 +0000

Happy Chinese New Year!

<figure >

<label for="marginfig-1" class="margin-toggle marginnote-ind"></label>
<input type="checkbox" id="marginfig-1" class="margin-toggle"/>
<span class="marginnote">

Dim sum. Fabulous Dim Sum at Mosquito in Barcelona.

Presentations

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 13:46:53 +0000

Talks #

“Prototyping APIs with OpenAPI” (tentative), apidays Paris, December 2025
“What is API Quality?”, Startup Galicia, A Coruña, April 2025
“API Governance Delivers Quality?”, apidays Paris, December 2024
“How to Build a Successful API Product”, Product Weekend, Barcelona, March 2024
“How to Build a Successful API Product”, apidays Paris, December 2023
“Growing your business with an API”, Nordic APIs Platform Summit, Stockholm, October 2017
“How to grow your business with an API”, Beta-i, Lisbon, March 2017
“How to grow your business with an API”, itnig, Barcelona, March 2017
“APIs Love to Chat”, APIdays Mediterranea, Barcelona, November 2016
“How to Automate API Testing”, Typeform, Barcelona, January 2016
“Asynchronous Microservices in node.js”, NodeConf, Barcelona, November 2015
“How to Automate API Discovery”, APIdays Mediterranea, Barcelona, May 2015
“API Design & The Paris Subway”, APIdays, Paris, December 2014
“The Importance of /me”, APIdays Mediterranea, Barcelona, May 30 2014
“Maintainable Consumers”, API Strategy & Practice, Amsterdam, March 2014
“API Code Generation”, BarcelonaJS, February 2014
“Bridging the Gap Between APIs and Customers”, APIdays Mediterranea, May 2013
“Who’s using your API?", API Strategy & Conference, February 2013
“node-fs”, BarcelonaJS, January 2013
“Inspirational Talk”, Beta talk, May 2011
“Is OAuth Really Secure?", IBWAS'10, December 2010
“Everything OAuth”, SAPO Codebits IV, November 2010
“Activity Streams and Contexts”, Google MiniBarcamp Lisbon, April 2009
“A Evolução de uma Ideia", Take Off 2008, April 19, 2008
“Web Services em PHP5", SAPO CodeBits 2007, November 13, 2007
“PHP, Smarty e o Template View Pattern", FSL 2007, October 12, 2007
“PHP and Web Services”, CITOT 2007, May 20, 2007

Lectures #

“What are Web APIs”, IronHack, Barcelona, January 2018
“Link extraction and classification", Instituto Superior Técnico, December 2010
“The Executable Web", ISCTE-IUL, May 2010
“Information Retrieval Challenges", INESC-ID, March 2010

Speaking at the first BarcelonaJS meetup

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 17:53:10 +0000

I’ll be speaking at the first BarcelonaJS meetup on January 30th in MOB, [Barcelona](http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=41.3833333333,2.18333333333&spn=0.1,0.1&q=41.3833333333,2.18333333333 (Barcelona)&t=h “Barcelona”).

I’ll be presenting node-fs and talking about my experience trying to fix the common problem of recursive directory creation, failing to get it accepted into the core of node.js, and planned features for node-fs.

Other speakers include Pablo Casado, who will be talking about how to start with node.js, and also Jordi Romero, discussing a hybrid solution that leverages node.js and Rails.

NoSQL Distilled

Sun, 20 Jan 2013 21:50:10 +0000

The term “NoSQL” is very ill-defined. It’s generally applied to a number of recent nonrelational databases such as Cassandra, Mongo, Neo4J, and Riak. They embrace schemaless data, run on clusters, and have the ability to trade off traditional consistency for other useful properties. Advocates of NoSQL databases claim that they can build systems that are more performant, scale much better, and are easier to program with. – NoSQL Distilled, by Martin Fowler

Home made mussels

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 19:43:26 +0000

Delicious steamed mussels paired with a chilled Albariño.

Do small experiments, often

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 19:11:33 +0000

A long time ago, I realized that every successful business was a continuous process of small experiments that operated in the context of a long-term vision. When an experiment worked, you did more of it. When it didn’t, you ended it and moved on. – in The $100,000 Experiment, by Brad Feld

Deliver on your promises

Tue, 01 Jan 2013 18:34:38 +0000

So if I can give entrepreneurs a single piece of advice for 2013 it would be to deliver on your promises. Not just to your investors but also to your team and ultimately to yourself. This is no time to be in denial. That is a lethal attribute in times like these. – in Advice for 2013: Deliver On Your Promises by Fred Wilson

Lager Hell

Mon, 24 Dec 2012 14:48:06 +0000

Raclette

Sun, 23 Dec 2012 13:12:19 +0000

Fantastico

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 19:42:11 +0000

Why refactoring?

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 12:43:47 +0000

Interesting thoughts about refactoring, starting with a comprehensive post by Jim Bird, stating what is not refactoring:

Fixing any bugs that you find along the way is not refactoring. Optimization is not refactoring. Tightening up error handling and adding defensive code is not refactoring. Making the code more testable is not refactoring – although this may happen as the result of refactoring. All of these are good things to do. But they aren’t refactoring. – in What Refactoring is, and what it isn’t

It’s all about retention

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 22:41:57 +0000

The most important metric today is retention. It tells you how often a customer comes back and uses your product again. – in Bullshit metrics

Red AGBAR tower

Sat, 01 Dec 2012 22:21:35 +0000

Writing great documentation

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 18:09:35 +0000

Writing great documentation

This advice will mostly be targeted towards those documenting libraries or frameworks intended for use by other developers, but much of it probably applies to any for of technical documentation.

Dinner in Granada

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 20:15:39 +0000

Dirty Duck

Fri, 16 Nov 2012 21:32:52 +0000

RethinkDB looks promising

Sat, 10 Nov 2012 23:14:05 +0000

RethinkDB is out – an open-source distributed database

RethinkDB is built to store JSON documents, and scale to multiple machines with very little effort. It has a pleasant query language that supports really useful queries like table joins and group by, and is easy to setup and learn.

An open-source distributed database with an intuitive query language, parallelized queries, and much more! It’s called RethinkDB and you can fork it on GitHub. What’s not to like?

Is the World socialist?

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 18:18:13 +0000

Revisiting an old story by Dave Winer: Ayn Rand was a Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter. Rand is best known as author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. She developed a philosophical system called Objectivism.

If you want to go back to the point where we decided to be socialist and try to undo it, you’re going to have to kill most of the people on the planet who depend on the current system for sustenance. And like it or not, that probably includes you. It certainly includes most of the idiots running around preaching Ayn Rand these days. – in The World is socialist

Without dissent there is no creativity

Tue, 06 Nov 2012 18:23:46 +0000

![Sticker advocating dissent: “dissent deve…](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2a/Dissent_develops_democracy_sticker.jpg/300px-Dissent_develops_democracy_sticker.jpg “Sticker advocating dissent: “dissent deve…”)

The founders that make a dent in the universe are dissidents. They are not afraid to tell their bosses they are idiots or tell their schools they been teaching the wrong thing or to tell an entire industry to think different. And more importantly they are not afraid to tell their country it’s mistaken. – in Entrepreneurs as Dissidents

Pizza

Tue, 06 Nov 2012 13:34:12 +0000

A crise da crise

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 19:45:25 +0000

O verdadeiro problema de Portugal não é a crise em si. É a crise da crise.

Passo a explicar: a palavra crise tem vários significados, entre eles os seguintes (ver ainda a definição completa):

Falta de alguma coisa considerada importante;
Manifestação súbita de um estado emocional ou nervoso.

Portugal tem um problema grave de falta de impaciência. Os portugueses são demasiado pacientes e acalmados. Não há intensidade nem nas suas palavras nem nas suas ações.

Tapas and beer

Sun, 23 Sep 2012 21:29:48 +0000

Tapas and beer

Use computers to do things

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 10:03:16 +0000

Use computers to do things

As you grow, your team’s development environment becomes really important. How long does it take to clone, set up, and boot your apps? Can your employees still be productive on an aging codebase? How can you automate CI, hooks, and other setup for new projects? Is any of this fun anymore?

4 Time-Saving Tumblr Tips

Sat, 15 Sep 2012 08:25:56 +0000

There are also plenty of third-party apps that can perform multiple tasks in one place. Tarpipe will automate your publishing on up to 22 different platforms and keep a backlog of activity

via 4 Time-Saving Tumblr Tips : Technology :: American Express OPEN Forum.

AsciiDoc

Wed, 12 Sep 2012 20:46:38 +0000

AsciiDoc is a text document format for writing notes, documentation, articles, books, ebooks, slideshows, web pages, man pages and blogs. AsciiDoc files can be translated to many formats including HTML, PDF, EPUB, man page. – via AsciiDoc Home Page.

Very interesting because it lets you export documents to DocBook and from there you can easily generate HTML and PDF.

Some books written using AsciiDoc:

Advertising’s bumpy transition

Tue, 11 Sep 2012 22:35:59 +0000

Advertising’s bumpy transition

Until advertisers start to value the focused, memorable, impactful opportunity they have in buying the right ads in the right place for the right audience, web users are going to be stuck seeing irrelevant ads on sites that don’t respect their time and attention as much as they should.

Black Swan Farming

Tue, 11 Sep 2012 18:34:21 +0000

Black Swan Farming

The total value of the companies we’ve funded is around 10 billion, give or take a few. But just two companies, Dropbox and Airbnb, account for about three quarters of it.

Use sprints to maximize productivity

Thu, 06 Sep 2012 21:18:54 +0000

Use sprints to maximize productivity

The powerful thing about Sprinting is that it helps you break projects down into actionable steps. Checking things off your todo list gives you a great sense of accomplishment throughout the day. Looking at all the completed todos on your list at the end of the day allows you to relax in the evening, knowing you accomplished a lot that day.

Agile development & WMSS

Tue, 04 Sep 2012 21:16:08 +0000

Agile development & WMSS

I think what I called We Make Shitty Software is in other words the same thing as the agile process. Whatever it’s called, we all acknowledge that our software is imperfect, it’s a process, but we’re working to make it better, and more responsive to users.

A Hardware Renaissance in Silicon Valley

Mon, 27 Aug 2012 20:55:43 +0000

A Hardware Renaissance in Silicon Valley

Today some of the most successful hardware start-ups in Silicon Valley have been formed from the diaspora of former Apple employees who want to try their hand at companies that pair hardware and software (…)

Water LED Art

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 12:18:29 +0000

Water LED Art

When art and electronics meet some very beautiful things can be born. Here Antonin Fourneau made this wonderful piece, basically a wall of circuit boards with LEDs, when exposed to water the LEDs light up.

Tent: Open Social Networking protocol

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 08:49:09 +0000

Tent: Open Social Networking protocol

Tent is a protocol for open, decentralized social networking. Tent users share content with apps and each other. Anyone can run a Tent server, or write an app or alternative server implementation that uses the Tent protocol. Users can take their content and relationships with them when they change or move servers. Tent supports extensible data types so developers can create new kinds of interaction.

Ghosts in the ROM

Wed, 22 Aug 2012 13:03:48 +0000

Ghosts in the ROM

(…) we noticed that there was a large amount of non-code, non-audio data. Adam Mayer tested different stride widths and found that at 67 bytes (536 pixels across) there appeared to be some sort of image data that clearly was a picture of people.

Amazon Glacier

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 08:45:29 +0000

Amazon Glacier

Amazon Glacier is an extremely low-cost storage service that provides secure and durable storage for data archiving and backup. In order to keep costs low, Amazon Glacier is optimized for data that is infrequently accessed and for which retrieval times of several hours are suitable. With Amazon Glacier, customers can reliably store large or small amounts of data for as little as $0.01 per gigabyte per month, a significant savings compared to on-premises solutions.

Harvard cracks DNA storage

Sat, 18 Aug 2012 10:36:43 +0000

Harvard cracks DNA storage

A bioengineer and geneticist at Harvard’s Wyss Institute have successfully stored 5.5 petabits of data – around 700 terabytes – in a single gram of DNA, smashing the previous DNA data density record by a thousand times.

A Casa Portuguesa

Thu, 16 Aug 2012 08:44:59 +0000

Falta de mão-de-obra qualificada

Tue, 14 Aug 2012 17:23:53 +0000

De acordo com alguns autores estamos a caminhar para uma falta generalizada de mão-de-obra qualificada. Este cenário começará por afectar o sector das tecnologias de informação mas alastrar-se-á a praticamente todas as áreas.

O artigo “Some Sectors in Europe Face a Labor Shortage” do NY Times demonstra algumas preocupações. Traduzindo o original:

(…) Dados do principal inquérito sobre falta de mão-de-obra da Comissão Europeia e de entrevistas em empresas das industrias de equipamento informático, software, ferramentas, moda e banca, revelam que a falta de mão-de-obra já não era tão acentuada desde os anos do boom tecnológico no princípio desta década. (…)

What is branch.com?

Tue, 14 Aug 2012 09:28:12 +0000

What is branch.com?

A mix between Convore, Google+ circles and some of FriendFeed… Their killer feature is called branching and it lets you create your own version of a conversation starting from a specific entry.

Greece

Mon, 13 Aug 2012 20:32:46 +0000

Will Greece leave the eurozone?

Portugal as a source of cheap talent

Mon, 13 Aug 2012 08:31:58 +0000

Portugal as a source of cheap talent

Western technology companies have traditionally looked to developing economies as a place to find cheap, abundant talent. But thanks to the Eurozone’s problems and the sovereign debt crisis, things are changing rapidly: Just ask the Portuguese, who are finding themselves subordinate to fast-growing [Brazil](http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=-15.75,-47.95&spn=10.0,10.0&q=-15.75,-47.95 (Brazil)&t=h “Brazil”).

Beer

Fri, 10 Aug 2012 11:33:32 +0000

Apple store Barcelona

Thu, 09 Aug 2012 19:14:45 +0000

pandoc

Thu, 09 Aug 2012 14:30:03 +0000

http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/index.html

If you need to convert files from one markup format into another, pandoc is your swiss-army knife.

If Xerox PARC Invented the PC, Google Invented the Internet

Thu, 09 Aug 2012 08:28:30 +0000

Google did a great job of slurping up some of the most talented researchers in the world at a time when places like Bell Labs and Xerox PARC were dying. It managed to grab not just their researchers, but their lifeblood.

Great story about some of the most under-appreciated engineers behind Google.

My stuff stretches the boundaries

Wed, 08 Aug 2012 09:28:41 +0000

my stuff stretches the boundaries of what’s possible, which makes it a mystery for many of the people I would like to have use it.

Dave Winer, writing about how most of the time what is easy and understandable for a developer is not for a regular user. In those cases, tutorials and proper documentation should be available.

Coffee

Tue, 07 Aug 2012 08:35:08 +0000

Force of Nature

Mon, 06 Aug 2012 13:41:48 +0000

I just found out about this great work by Robert Buelteman.

MapReduce related patterns

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 21:16:15 +0000

Here’s a list of possible MapReduce related patterns I’ve been thinking about:

map-update: update each mapped document and emit its updated or original version;
map-delete: delete each mapped document;
map-reduce-map: map results of a map-reduce;
map-map: map results of a map;
map-recurse: apply recursion to the mapping function until a stop condition occurs;
any combination of patterns, e.g., map-reduce-map-update.

Example usage:

get the e-mail address of every customer with a negative balance: map-reduce-map. First, map-reduce to get the aggregate balance for each customer, then map again to get only customers with negative value and emit their e-mail address;
delete all documents older than one month: map-delete. First, map to get all documents older than one month and then delete each one;
get a list of documents and mark them as read: map-update. First, map to get the list of documents according to a given criteria, then update each document marking it as read;
and so on…

node-fs npm package

Thu, 14 Apr 2011 10:30:14 +0000

node-fs is now available as an npm package. Just run npm install node-fs, require(’node-fs’) and have fun.

Blog posts firehoses

Wed, 13 Apr 2011 23:40:55 +0000

Three more firehoses to get all blog posts from the following platforms:

blogger posts, through their changes.xml;
tumblr posts, through superfeedr’s track feature;
WordPress.com posts, through their firehose feature.

While the first feed is free of charge, the other two have an attached price tag.

Also worth investigating is Paul Kinlan’s faux firehose for blogger.

Drinking from the firehose

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 15:22:27 +0000

Some firehoses to ~~drink~~ read from, other than twitter’s:

Google Buzz, through their activity firehose API methods;
FriendFeed, using their real-time updates methods.

While the first works via pubsubhubhub, the second uses a combination of long polling and a cursor that helps you make subsequent calls.

Are we inside a bubble?

Mon, 11 Apr 2011 16:03:36 +0000

Very interesting post by Brad Feld about technology cycles.

If you recognize that we are in a strong, positive, upward segment of the current “tech company creation cycle”, that’s more than enough. You should accept that we’ll be back in a downward part of the cycle at some point, but that we don’t know if it’ll be in a week, month, year, or decade. – I Encourage Entrepreneurs To Ignore The Word “Bubble”

FPC: a floating-point compressor

Fri, 08 Apr 2011 13:14:59 +0000

FPC is a very fast lossless compressor with better results than most traditional algorithms:

FPC compresses linear sequences of IEEE 754 double-precision floating-point values by sequentially predicting each value, xoring the true value with the predicted value, and leading-zero compressing the result.

Three things to remember

Fri, 08 Apr 2011 00:00:32 +0000

Three simple things that can make all the difference.

talk about things you’ve done, not about things that you wish you did;
measure reactions to everything you do, react by changing things if needed;
stop planning and just do it!

node-fs

Wed, 05 Jan 2011 19:20:30 +0000

Following my previous post about recursive directory creation with nodejs, I created the node-fs repository on github. node-fs is a way to extend nodejs original fs library, adding recursive directory creation to the mkdir() and mkdirSync() functions.

Is OAuth Really Secure?

Wed, 05 Jan 2011 01:01:27 +0000

“Is OAuth Really Secure?” is the title of a talk I gave at the IBWAS'10 conference, last December.

Is the OAuth protocol really secure? Even though the OAuth authorization protocol has been published as the RFC 5849 and is being widely adopted by large Internet companies, it’s important to stress out its possible security vulnerabilities.

This talk focuses on the OWASP Top 10 Application Security Risks and how OAuth is affected by them. While some of the security risks are mitigated by OAuth, developers need to take some action to prevent other risks from affecting their implementations.

Publications

Tue, 04 Jan 2011 14:29:01 +0000

Published books #

B. Pedro, “Building an API Product: Design, implement, release, and maintain API products that meet user needs”, Packt Publishing, 2024
B. Doerrfeld, A. Krohn, K. Sandoval, and B. Pedro, “The API Lifecycle: An Agile Process for Managing the Life of an API”, Nordic APIs, 2015
B. Pedro and V. Rodrigues, “PHP et Smarty pour du développement web à grande échelle” (in french), Editions O’Reilly, ISBN 2-35402-072-4, November 2007 (republished in 2009 by Digit Books with ISBN 978-2-81500-047-5)
B. Pedro and V. Rodrigues, “PHP and Smarty on Large-Scale Web Development”, O’Reilly Media Inc., ISBN 0-596-51379-8, June 20, 2007

Published magazine articles #

B. Pedro, “The executable Web”, O’Reilly ONLamp, June 2008
B. Pedro, “Caching techniques for the PHP developer”, php architect, Vol. III, issue 2, pp. 51–57, February 2004.
B. Pedro, “Transforming XML with PHP”, XML.com, June 18, 2003.
B. Pedro, “Using The PEAR::XML Transformer”, php architect, Vol. II, issue 4, pp. 52–60, April 2003.
B. Pedro, “Miképp növelhetjük PHP-programjaink sebességét?” (in hungarian), Linuxvilág, Vol. 15, pp. 34–35, April 2002.
B. Pedro, “Improving the Speed of PHP Web Scripts”, Linux Journal, Vol. 95, p. 78, 80–81, March 2002.
B. Pedro, “The Future of Web Hosting: Web Content Management”, Business International, p. 174, Spring 2002.
B. Pedro, “Deleting Temporary Files Created by Web Sites Using PHP”, Sys Admin: The Journal for UNIX Systems Administrators, 11(2), p. 30, 32–33, February 2002.

MapReduce literature

Wed, 22 Dec 2010 13:13:45 +0000

Just a quick note to point to two valuable MapReduce related resources:

“MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters”, by Jeffrey Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat: the original paper describing Google’s MapReduce strategy;

MapReduce is a programming model and an associated implementation for processing and generating large data sets. Users specify a map function that processes a key/value pair to generate a set of intermediate key/value pairs, and a reduce function that merges all intermediate values associated with the same intermediate key. Many real world tasks are expressible in this model, as shown in the paper.

JavaScript filesystem database

Tue, 21 Dec 2010 18:33:00 +0000

I couldn’t resist and, after many conversations with Mário Valente, I challenged myself to build a complete JavaScript filesystem based database from scratch. In short, something like CouchDB but written in JavaScript and using a filesystem approach for document storage.

Some characteristics of this new database system:

fully written in JavaScript: nodeJS is my choice for its architecture and portability;
every document must contain only JSON data;
every document can be manipulated on the filesystem: the idea is to allow someone to edit a document using vim, for instance, without breaking anything. It also lets you easily backup, move or replicate your data without creating a heavy load on the database;
the underlying filesystem can be changed: changing the underlying filesystem offers numerous possibilities, like easy distribution (using OpenAFS, XTREEMFS or others), replication (using finefs or others), and even attaching different backends (using FUSE, for example);
the system must be available through an HTTP REST interface: this makes it very easy to immediately integrate the system into any existing applications. Bonus points if the API is compatible with CouchDB;
queries must be performed using a MapReduce approach: this should make it very easy to perform queries on a large dataset.

So, right now I’m half way through it. I managed to write the backend and I’m on my way to the HTTP REST interface. I’ll create a github repo after I have something functional that can be easily built and tested.

Recursive directory creation with nodejs

Wed, 15 Dec 2010 15:36:07 +0000

I’m doing some code in nodejs and I found the need to create directories recursively. Basically I need to have the same functionality offered by mkdir -p.

The fs lib doesn’t offer this functionality so I looked around but couldn’t really find anything that suited me. I finally gave up and I’m writing the function myself.

Here’s the code:

 1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40


var fs = require('fs');

/**
 * Offers functionality similar to mkdir -p
 *
 * Asynchronous operation. No arguments other than a possible exception
 * are given to the completion callback.
 */
function mkdir_p(path, mode, callback, position) {
 mode = mode || 0777;
 position = position || 0;
 parts = require('path').normalize(path).split('/');

 if (position >= parts.length) {
 if (callback) {
 return callback();
 } else {
 return true;
 }
 }

 var directory = parts.slice(0, position + 1).join('/');
 fs.stat(directory, function(err) {
 if (err === null) {
 mkdir_p(path, mode, callback, position + 1);
 } else {
 fs.mkdir(directory, mode, function (err) {
 if (err) {
 if (callback) {
 return callback(err);
 } else {
 throw err;
 }
 } else {
 mkdir_p(path, mode, callback, position + 1);
 }
 })
 }
 })
}

Update: I just converted this code into an extension to the original fs lib so that it’s easier to use. The extended lib is called node-fs and is available on npm. To install it, simply run npm install node-fs --save.

Developing a Sales Model

Wed, 01 Dec 2010 17:35:09 +0000

Very interesting thoughts about developing a repeatable sales model:

Start with one or two salespeople and restrict them to a local geography. Make sure they’re selling effectively before hiring others. It’s far harder to change messaging and direction in a large distributed organization. With just one or two people, your sales team can get together face-to-face to discuss problems they’re seeing, as well as what’s working.

Original article: Accelerate Your Startup: Develop a Repeatable Sales Model on GigaOMtech.

It’s demo time

Sat, 27 Nov 2010 15:48:34 +0000

I’m doing a demo of the new tarpipe WordPress plugin on the WP Portugal meeting.

Testing a new tarpipe plugin

Fri, 26 Nov 2010 20:50:41 +0000

This is just a test of a new tarpipe WordPress plugin that I’ve just created.

Your Google Alerts can be deleted by anyone

Wed, 15 Sep 2010 23:43:57 +0000

I found out the hard way that my Google Alerts can be deleted by anyone, if they have access to the “Remove” URL.

Here’s how it works: Google will send you e-mail alerts whenever it finds results for any search terms you specify. At the bottom of each message there are 3 links:

“Remove this alert”
“Create another alert”
“Manage your alerts”

The problem is with the first link. I tried it several times, first using Chrome’s incognito mode but then opening the link on a different browser, making sure that I wasn’t signed in to any Google application.

Where is the Web going?

Thu, 13 May 2010 13:29:42 +0000

I need to share a great video documentary by Kate Ray called Web 3.0. Here’s a transcribed quote:

If I was gonna start a news business tomorrow I would start a news business designed to produce not one new bit of news, but instead to aggregate news for individuals in ways that matter to them. – Clay Shirky (1'18")

Web 3.0 from Kate Ray on Vimeo.

Re: Afternoon sellout notes

Mon, 10 May 2010 22:50:03 +0000

Dave Winer praises Dropbox technology and goes further by suggesting that everyone should be able to run their own private servers:

(…) the technology that Dropbox has mastered is so important that there should be an open source equivalent that we can all deploy, so we can have Dropboxes for sensitive info we don’t want to share with them (…)

I’m a happy Dropbox user myself and I went looking for options. Well, there isn’t an out-of-the-box open source equivalent to Dropbox but you could easily build one:

DecentralizedAddresses Chrome extension

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 14:24:36 +0000

After much discussion around the @replies subject I started thinking about a system that could automatically resolve social network addresses no matter where they appear. I then decided to try the approach of writing a Chrome extension that could do the job.

The DecentralizedAddresses extension is in development and is available on github for anyone to contribute. As my JavaScript skills are not very good, any help would be highly appreciated.

More on the @replies subject

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 19:35:56 +0000

I just stumbled on a Buzz by DeWitt Clinton about a possible solution to the use of decentralized @replies. From the Buzz:

I want to throw some ideas out there about how it can someday be done in a decentralized fashion using open technologies such as WebFinger, Portable Contacts, AtomPub, and Activity Streams. (And maybe Salmon. Read on.)

The proposal would let you address any user of any application in a complete decentralized way.

On the use of the @ syntax by Google Buzz

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 14:37:58 +0000

Just a quick note to archive the way Google Buzz is using the @ syntax. From “Google Buzz Tips”:

If you’d like to send a private message to someone, type @ and use Gmail’s autocomplete feature to find the email address of your contact.

In practice, you address other users by typing an @ symbol followed by their e-mail address, like @user@example.com. This is exactly what I proposed a while ago as an easy way to address any user on any Web application:

For free? Why?

Mon, 28 Dec 2009 13:41:10 +0000

Great post by Pedro Pinheiro about making a business around art. I particularly like this excerpt:

For free? Why?

Because the money to be earned is not on things that can be copied. That’s a lost battle. If you’re a musician, you can make more money on concerts and events. If you’re a photographer, more money can be made by shooting specific assignments for customers, or on photography workshops. If you’re a writer, you can make more money by participating as a speaker at conferences. The era of making something and just making your livelihood from just that is nearing its end. And getting your creations known to the widest possible audience is the key for getting work that can’t be replicated.

Re: Twitter URLs: Are Microformats The Answer To A Real Problem?

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 12:40:24 +0000

Stowe Boyd writes about a possible approach to address different user profiles on different clients. After exposing a possible microformats based approach he talks about a microsyntax solution to the problem:

A microsyntax approach would be something visible in the stream, like including a prefix in front of an @mention or retweet to denote original or desired client:

dabr@pigsonthewing Nice profile!

Here, the implication is that I am referring to Andy’s profile on the Dabr client.

Cliqset FeedProxy and the ActivityStreams format

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 23:30:24 +0000

Great news:

the Cliqset FeedProxy tool will normalize feeds from more than 70 other services into new feeds in the ActivityStreams format. It may just be an initial inroad to interoperability between these networks, provided by a 3rd party and not yet extensively used – but it’s an important step none the less.

Read the original: The Day The Highway Went Coast-to-Coast: 70+ SocNet Feeds Normalized by New API on ReadWriteWeb.

Re: Bing Tries To Buy The News on TechCrunch

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 10:20:46 +0000

In order to actually make a dent in Google’s market share, Bing would have to pay such exorbitant sums to so many different news companies that it would be difficult to recoup its investment. Bing certainly get some marketing buzz out of any such move, but that’s about it.

Here’s a list of links about this:

Microsoft and News Corp eye web pact on FT
Thoughts On A “Killer” Bing-News Corp Deal & The Myth Of An “OPEC For News” on search engine land
Microsoft Offers To Pay News Corp To “De-List” Itself From Google on The Business Insider
Will News Corp move its content to Microsoft’s Bing? on The Guardian

Read the original post: Bing Tries To Buy The News on TechCrunch.

foursquare is finally available in Lisbon

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 16:26:06 +0000

That was about time! They added Lisbon and a bunch of other cities around the world. I’m finally using the Android application and, so far, I’m enjoying it.

Check out my foursquare profile and friend me!

Re: More On Cross-Platform Tumbling: Following Is Mostly RSS on /Message

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 15:25:21 +0000

You say:

My sense is that cross-platform following can mostly be achieved by RSS subscription, although following does include a notification aspect. For example, in both Typepad and Tumblr I can expose the list of those that I am following, and those that are following me. Various platforms need only to notify each other of following and unfollowing, and the identities involved, and then cross-platform following semantics works.

I agree with using RSS subscription as a cross-platform following mechanism but I’d stop there. If you’re gonna use RSS over HTTP then you can use the unique visitors metric as your “followers” count and the referrer information to find out who those followers are.

Re: Where is RSS? on Scripting News

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 14:14:32 +0000

This is a post to test a communication flow using a feed reader and a blog post as a “distributed twitter”.

Read the original story: Where is RSS? on Scripting News.

A possible future for Chrome OS

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 13:54:38 +0000

I’m writing this after building Chrome OS from scratch and running it from a USB drive. In fact, what I built and ran wasn’t Chrome OS but instead Chromium OS. There’s a big difference not just in the name. According to Google:

Today we are open-sourcing the [Chrome OS] project as Chromium OS. We are doing this early, a year before Google Chrome OS will be ready for users, because we are eager to engage with partners, the open source community and developers. As with the Google Chrome browser, development will be done in the open from this point on. This means the code is free, accessible to anyone and open for contributions.

Small experiment

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 01:33:29 +0000

This is a very short experimental post.

Published via tarpipe.

Mirror Worlds

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 21:34:48 +0000

A comment to my recent post “Streamnets” caught my attention to dig further because it mentioned the concept of Mirror Worlds, a written work by David Gelernter. It’s a fascinating book, quite ahead of its time – it was published back in 1993.

According to Gelernter, “[Mirror Worlds] are software models of some chunk of reality, some piece of the real world going on outside your window”. These pieces of the real world can be of diverse natures:

RSSCloud, a PubSubHubbub alternative?

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 22:41:21 +0000

Great news for all RSS advocates: Dave Winer somehow convinced Matt Mullenweg to automatically support RSSCloud on all WordPress.com blogs.

Quoting ReadWriteWeb, who apparently broke the news:

All blogs on the WordPress.com platform and any WordPress.org blogs that opt-in will now make instant updates available to any RSS readers subscribed to a new feature called RSSCloud. There is currently only one RSS aggregator that supports RSSCloud, Dave Winer’s brand-new reader River2. That will probably change very soon.

If you have a WordPress.org blog, you can easily install the recently launched RSSCloud plugin, by Joseph Scott, an employee of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.

Streamnets

Sun, 06 Sep 2009 22:43:36 +0000

IDEA

The Internet is the infrastructure needed to interconnect machines to one another and guarantee that they’re online most of the time. According to Wikipedia, the Internet “is a network of networks that consists of millions of private and public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope that are linked by copper wires, fiber-optic cables, wireless connections, and other technologies.”

Then, Streamnets are ad-hoc networks created by Spimes or other sensor based machines in order to advertise their activity streams onto the Internet. These networks don’t need to be online all the time, don’t require high bandwidth, and will use any existing communications technology, most probably wireless through GSM or even other types of RF for shorter or longer distances.

To REST or not to REST

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 08:41:51 +0000

Yesterday @esjewett pointed out that tarpipe’s API 2.0 might not be considered RESTful. Quoting the previously written article “A RESTful ESME API”:

REST is often seen as an alternative to RPC APIs, or “Remote Procedure Call” APIs. At root, the difference as described by Wikipedia is that RPC is about telling an application to do something while REST is about changing the state of the resources of an application.

Paul Sadauskas, on another article about the same subject, adds some rules that your API should not follow:

Clients have to read documentation to know the locations of top-level resources.

Clients have to concatenate strings to get to the next resource.

You have an “API/Key/Token” in a header or a url.

You have a version string in a url.

All this made me think about possible changes to become RESTful. Things seem to be easy when you’re offering operations to resources you own or control. When you’re dealing with processes that’s a whole different story. As @esjewett best puts it:

Performance oriented FFT

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 11:05:55 +0000

Worth checking out. Quoting the FFTW Home Page:

FFTW is a C subroutine library for computing the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) in one or more dimensions, of arbitrary input size, and of both real and complex data (as well as of even/odd data, i.e. the discrete cosine/sine transforms or DCT/DST). We believe that FFTW, which is free software, should become the FFT library of choice for most applications.

Now, can it work when you have less than 16KB available RAM?

Pie charts are overrated

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 10:41:57 +0000

Quoting Seth’s Blog: How to make graphs that work:

Pie charts are spectacularly overrated. If you want to show me that four out of five dentists prefer Trident and that we need to target the fifth one, show me a picture of 5 dentists, but make one of them stand out. I’ll remember that.

Unless, of course, all you want to do is give a sense of all different percentages.

What is a CouchApp

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 18:41:36 +0000

Quoting the CouchApp wiki:

[CouchApps are]

utilities to make standalone CouchDB application development simple.

Some interesting links:

about authentication: CouchApps and user authentication
a tutorial: Hosted Applications
a real application using CouchApps: Ajatus CRM

Focus on your active users

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 13:31:03 +0000

Quoting The Difference Between Total Users and Active Users:

It is not a problem for a service to have a large group of non-active users if they have a large group of active users. It’s the latter group that you need to focus on. Over time, I’ve learned that many non-active users become active for one reason or another. But they don’t become active by focusing on them. They become active because you focus on the successful users and make them even more successful.

Vimeo will delete originals after one week

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 21:41:49 +0000

Quoting New source file policy on Vimeo Staff Blog:

Starting August 1st, basic accounts’ original source files will be stored for one week from the upload date, after which they will be removed.

(…)

This new one-week policy applies to all basic accounts’ videos uploaded from this point onwards. For videos that were uploaded before this blog post, those original files will be available until August 1st, to give you some time to download them if you need to. After August 1st, those files will also be removed.

Should twitter have its own data storage?

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 12:34:56 +0000

Now that twitter OAuth feature is in public beta, some people argue that twitter should also provide a data storage facility through their API. This would allow developers to add payloads to different twitter objects but would create another information silo, instead of leveraging existing data storage providers.

I agree with Kevin Marks when he asks “Why should the storage and the event stream come from the same provider?”.

Quoting Dave Winer’s article “Twitter and OAuth, interesting brew”:

Do you agree with twitter following limits?

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 12:00:21 +0000

Quoting the twitter status blog post “Twitter Status – A note about per day following limits.”:

While there are technical reasons behind having some limit on following activites, this per-day limit exists to discourage spamminess. Also, it is unlikely that anyone can actually read tweets from thousands of accounts which makes the mass following activity disingenuous.

What do you think?

Testing the tarpipe WordPress plugin

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 11:41:19 +0000

Testing

The real time Web?

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 22:38:35 +0000

Much has been said about friendfeed‘s latest UI redesign and how it enables a real time view of content from across the Web. Is it really real time? I mean, content is pulled periodically from other applications into friendfeed so that it can be displayed to the end user.

This post was triggered in part by a tweet from Ian Mikutel:

Read your preso on Activity Streams & Context. Does new FriendFeed with Real Time everywhere ruin your “middleman” argument now?

How to share a secret

Sat, 03 Jan 2009 17:15:38 +0000

“How to Share a Secret” is the title of paper written in 1979 by Adi Shamir (best known for his work on the RSA algorithm). The paper describes a method for dividing information in smaller pieces so that the knowledge of all but one of the pieces gives absolutely no information about the original information. Quoting the author:

This technique enables the construction of robust key management schemes for cryptographic systems that can function securely and reliably even when misfortunes destroy half the pieces and security breaches expose all but one of the remaining pieces.

Cloud Balancer

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 16:07:41 +0000

The latest Amazon S3 blackout made me think what could be done to try to solve this problem, when your application depends on S3 or any other cloud service.

Does this mean that you should all stop using cloud services and go back to your own data center? No way! There are better and more reasonable solutions. They just need a bit of thought and some experimentation.

Some people, like Dave Winer, can even see that a new service can emerge from this need. On his article “Amazon S3 down all day”, Dave proposes a possible solution:

Lifestreaming aggregators

Sat, 22 Mar 2008 12:25:24 +0000

Lifestreaming aggregators became popular as the number of different applications where you could participate – either by updating your status or by uploading something – increased. The aggregators are here to relieve you from the burden of going to multiple locations to find out what your friends or contacts are up to.

Services like plaxo, spokeo, friendfeed or socialthing (lifestream blog has a more compreheensible list) start by asking your identification on different services. Then they aggregate information you update on those services and let you – and your contacts – access that information from a central location.

Sending errors to your ticketing system

Tue, 29 Jan 2008 19:26:01 +0000

I’ve been thinking about developing a PHP Logger that will talk to your favorite ticketing system. The idea is to capture code and application generated errors and create tickets accordingly.

At a first glance, I could use the Reflection API to get meta-information about the code. Tickets could then be created and assigned to the appropriate person based on the @author doc tag.

The ticket Logger could talk to existing Web project management and ticketing application like Basecamp, Goplan and Hiveminder (from the creators of RT).

O paradoxo de Abilene

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 19:16:19 +0000

O paradoxo de Abilene define uma situação em que um grupo de pessoas se vê forçado a agir de uma forma oposta às suas preferências. No paradoxo de Abilene todos os membros do grupo deixam-se levar por uma determinada preferência, apesar de não estarem de acordo, porque pensam que todos os outros membros concordam.

O nome do paradoxo surge a partir de uma estória em que todos os membros de uma família, estando sentados confortavelmente em sua casa, decidem ir passear a Abilene (uma cidade no Texas). A viagem foi um inferno para cada um deles, apesar de nenhum mencionar tal facto, pensando que os outros estavam a gostar. Só no regresso o problema foi levantado, mas aí era tarde de mais…

Collaborative filtering

Tue, 16 Oct 2007 21:10:03 +0000

Are you tired of your feed reader? Do you wish you could find more interesting posts, or perhaps new blogs related to your current tastes and preferences?

Apparently Dave Winer feels the same way:

I want rating services to provide clues about what I should be subscribing to. I want them to find not what’s popular with the masses but what will be valuable to me.

He then touches the sweet spot:

Adegga and AVIN

Sun, 14 Oct 2007 18:13:12 +0000

Do you enjoy wine? You’re gonna love Adegga, the place where you can discover new wines by looking at other people’s tastings and findings.

Adegga just came out of a closed beta and right now anyone can start using it as long as they get invited by another user. That’s right, during an initial phase, registration is only available to invited users. This is a way of controlling the growth and making any necessary adjustments as the user base expands.

What have you been doing all these years?

Sun, 12 Aug 2007 21:49:34 +0000

Do you know Netvibes? What about Eskobo, Pageflakes, Protopage, Schmedley and Webwag, to name just a few?

Netvibes calls itself the pioneer of the personalized startpage. Quoting their about page:

Netvibes pioneered the personalized startpage, an alternative to traditional Web portals

Well, dit it? Let’s travel back to 1999 when there was no such thing as AJAX or RoR, and Mike Arrington was just leaving the comfort of his office at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati to dedicate his time to the “brand new Web”.

Placestreaming

Tue, 17 Jul 2007 17:31:59 +0000

The guys at Brightkite came up with the idea of capturing user-generated content and associating it to a particular place where the user is located. Quoting their blog post:

Placestreaming, as in the stream of content originating from a specific place. We think this really captures what Brightkite is all about. We enable location based conversations. And location based conversations, in aggregate, are placestreams.

You’ll be able to stream about a certain place when you’re there or even when you get home. What’s more interesting though is the ability to actually receive information about a place when you’re in that location:

PHP and Smarty on Large-Scale Web Development

Tue, 26 Jun 2007 12:36:19 +0000

Do you have to deal with large projects on a daily basis and feel that you’re always behind schedule? Have you tried all the available frameworks and quit because they don’t really fit into your development methodology? Are you a Web designer tired of writing PHP code all day long?

PHP and Smarty on Large-Scale Web Development is a Short Cut Book from O’Reilly that I wrote along with Vitor Rodrigues. It’s a book for developers, engineering managers and Web designers. It shows you what a good choice using PHP and Smarty can be for Large Scale Web projects.

Hackday network

Fri, 08 Jun 2007 10:10:34 +0000

The guys at backnetwork did a great job by providing a full social network for the London Hackday 2007 event. You are encouraged to participate by creating your own profile and linking to friends and acquaintances that you might have.

They also opened their application to outside users by providing a very simple API where you can perform several tasks. You need, of course, to be registered to do that.

PHP and Web Services

Sun, 20 May 2007 22:32:49 +0000

I’ve been kindly invited by Prof.Carlos Costa to present a workshop at the CITOT 2007 conference. The conference has just finished and I’m sharing my presentation slides right here. You can also download the full presentation (PDF format, 1.5MB).

I also had a great time during the coffee breaks talking about different subjects, from Open Source to Web Art. I hope more conferences like this take place in Portugal because it’s a fantastic way to share opinions and, who knows, start new projects.

London Hack Day

Fri, 18 May 2007 14:23:47 +0000

Yahoo! and BBCBackstage are organizing London Hack Day. The event will take place in London, at the Alexandra Palace, on the weekend of June 16th and 17th. More than 400 developers are being invited to participate in this amazing hacking party. Hack Day can best be described as (quoting Wikipedia)

(…) an open participatory hacking session where attendees were encouraged to create web applications that utilized one or more of Yahoo’s APIs and open source libraries.

Social Complexity in Software Development

Sat, 10 Mar 2007 16:54:06 +0000

Software complexity is increasing as time goes by and is now becoming a nightmare for every developer. To begin with, let’s find out what complexity is:

A complex system is a system for which it is difficult, if not impossible to restrict its description to a limited number of parameters or characterising variables without losing its essential global functional properties.

So, it’s getting more and more difficult to restrict software’s description to a limited number of parameters without losing its global functional properties. What that means is that it’s getting harder to come up with a piece of software that does exactly what was requested, not more nor less.

Large-scale reuse and remix on the Web

Tue, 30 Jan 2007 22:43:21 +0000

Javascript Dataflow Architecture (JDA) is a project from Maya that attempts to solve the issues associated to large-scale reuse and remix on the Web through the use of black box composition. Quoting their Website:

Remember back in the mid 90s when we could tinker with the Web by just copying and pasting a bunch of HTML? You know how with Web Services and Javascript we can do a lot more cool stuff on the Web these days? Except, it’s no longer as simple as just copying and pasting HTML? Why can’t we do all these cool next-gen Web stuff while maintaining the tinkerer’s culture of the original Web? We believe this can be done.

The Web Browser as an Information Broker

Tue, 09 Jan 2007 14:39:45 +0000

How can the Web Browser stop being simply a layout renderer and start using data in an intelligent way? Alex Faaborg of Mozilla sheds some light on this subject:

Much in the same way that operating systems currently associate particular file types with specific applications, future Web browsers are likely going to associate semantically marked up data you encounter on the Web with specific applications, either on your system or online.

This is a great move for Firefox 3 (or Gran Paradiso as they like to call it). He then continues commenting the chaotic use of micro formats throughout the Web:

The Unfolded Web

Thu, 30 Nov 2006 00:10:00 +0000

People all over are talking about the end of Web 2.0 in favor of a new, distributed network of information. Some people even suggested that we should start building a Web 3.0. What are the main characteristics of this new paradigm? Here’s a short list:

easier and cheaper, on a BusinessWeek article by Stephen Baker
giving meaning to data, on a NY Times article by John Markoff
much more useful than Web 2.0, on a blog post by Nick Carr
the semantic web, on a blog post by Rod Boothby

Put simply, the new Web will be easier to the end-user and will make meaning out of data distributed across multiple services. More recently, an article by Bill Thompson on The Register caught my attention. Quoting the author:

Widgets are everywhere

Tue, 14 Nov 2006 22:13:36 +0000

An interesting breed of applications is showing up all around these days. Yes, I’m talking about web widgets. Usually these widgets provide an alternative interface for an existing website. Let’s see how this software category emerged.

Widgets exist for a long time now. I dare to say that they exist since the first windowed UI appeared. These were the so called widget toolkits. I’m talking about things like the X Window System (20 years old) and, on a higher level, Motif. How are the new widgets any different from its predecessors?

Like Java for content

Wed, 01 Nov 2006 05:41:41 +0000

Java original motto was (and still is) “Write once, run anywhere”. Software written in the Java language can run on virtually any computer platform, including mobile devices. The only catch: usually applications are sluggish because they tend to consume lots of memory.

Web content is following the same path. RSS and other forms of syndication enable content to be consumed anywhere without the need to rewrite it for every device you want to support. The only catch: devices need to understand the content distribution format (usually some variant of XML).

Unfolding the Web

Sun, 22 Oct 2006 17:23:49 +0000

Originally posted at the O’Reilly ONLamp Blog:

What if you could use the Web as a whole as a data storage object? What if you could write simple applications that would simply live on the Web and feed from the Web?

I think the Web right now is cut down into a million pieces that don’t talk to each other properly. What you’ve seen so far is information being gathered from the edge into aggregator applications. What about using everything as a whole? No more edge and center. No more aggregators. The information will just grow organically.

About

Tue, 22 Nov 2005 10:20:38 +0000

Bruno Pedro is a computer science professional with over 25 years of experience in the industry. Throughout his career, he has worked on a variety of projects, including Internet traffic analysis, API backends and integrations, and Web applications. He has also managed teams of developers and founded several companies, including tarpipe, an iPaaS, in 2008, and the API Changelog in 2015. In addition to his work experience, Bruno has also made contributions to the API industry through his written work, including two published books on API-related topics and numerous technical magazine and web articles. He has also been a speaker at numerous API industry conferences and events since 2013.

Transforming XML with PHP

Wed, 18 Jun 2003 18:00:00 +0200

This post was originally published on XML.com as “Transforming XML with PHP”. This article compares two methods of transforming XML in PHP: PEAR’s XML_Transformer package and the W3C XML transformation language XSLT. I will first describe the PEAR project and its philosophy, with a focus on its XML transformation techniques. I will then give a brief introduction to XSLT and the way to use it from PHP.

Introduction #

PEAR’s main goal is to become a repository for PHP extensions and libraries. Its members try to standardize the way developers write portable and re-usable code João Prado Maia. An Introduction to PEAR. May 2001. O’Reilly Network .