I recently moved most of my websites over to Netlify, because, well - I work there, and I want to be dogfooding as much of our product as possible. As part of this, I enabled my sites to use Netlify Analytics, which has been a fantastic lens to look at the site usage from a server-side perspective.

Spotify's foray into podcasting may be fairly recent, but I'm already discovering some interesting APIs that I can play with. The podcaster dashboard is tremendously useful and offers way more data than Apple and Google combined (with better reliability too), so the more I use it, the more I started thinking that it would be helpful for me to build some kind of automation mechanism to ingest the data into my own storage and then process it outside the default dashboard boundaries. In the process, I also spotted a little thing that I wanted to share with readers, and that is the ability to enable experimental features inside your podcast private view.

Twitter just announced that they are re-launching their verification program, and now you can check whether you are eligible directly from your Twitter account settings. Neat! Which naturally made me curious as to what they used behind the scenes, since in previous instances of the process they used a form that likely was manually reviewed. Before I dive in, I want to call out - no, I am not important enough to be verified, nor do I care about getting the blue tick.

Not too long ago, I was reading Charlie Kindel's "You're Thinking of Your Career Trajectory Wrong" and it reminded me of yet another trope that somehow is very commonplace, at least in the tech industry - your career is not a sprint, it's a marathon. It comes from a well-intentioned desire to communicate the fact that careers should be looked at through the long-term lens, which makes sense - we rarely hear the story of someone being right out of college and then becoming a Vice President of Product at a Fortune 500. It's all about the long game. But it also sets a lot of folks for failure early on.

The recent saga with the botched remake of the Grand Theft Auto Trilogy reminded me of the topic of this blog post, and I figured - what better time than now to get it out of my brain and into an array of bits. The topic today is rented software. Writing this I really feel like "old man yelling at (software) cloud," but maybe by some miracle it'll grab the attention of those making these kinds of decisions.

Recently my Xbox started yelling at me every time I started taking a new game capture, reminding me that the storage for my account is full on the Xbox Live network. When I first got it, I thought that it had something to do with the fact that I am blocking outbound telemetry requests through PiHole, and all of a sudden, my local cache filled up.

Every year (unless you're one of those Apple Music people) music fans rejoice to get their Spotify Wrapped, or - the musical year in review. It's a fun way to explore the most frequently listened to songs and artists. And every year up until this one, if memory serves me right, the experience could be viewed in the browser. And then, I paid the site a visit in the year 2021.

The other day, Clint Rutkas (yes, that Clint Rutkas) tweeted about a potential scenario that GitHub does not have built-in, but that could be useful for folks that want to have a deeper look at the performance of their repositories - identifying "center of gravity" issues. What that means is essentially finding issues that are cross-referenced the most from other issues.

What's the most painful part of building anything with APIs? According to a tweet question I asked recently, one of the common themes was "authentication." Surprise, surprise - we're making that experience a bit easier with Netlify API Authentication by completely removing the step of handling the OAuth process "by hand."

It's ridiculous that I have to write it, but it looks like there is no hope in this being an actual feature of the Microsoft Edge web browser - setting a blank new tab. Not a tab with minimal ads, but just one that is blank. You know, the thing that you could set in Firefox for ages.