Matt

  • Project Mu

    In a one night spark of interest I thought I’d write a webframework that deploys to Amazon Lambda and API Gateway. A web framework that deploys to a serverless environment is kind of an interesting idea.  Costs scale directly with the users and limit the base costs in some cases all the way to $0.…

  • Why You Need a Meta Project

    I got this idea from the guys at Yelp and how they manage their deployments and several internal infratructure tools. The basic concept is this: If you had a source of information about all your projects in a simple easy to work with format what kind of tooling would be easy to implement with it?…

  • Raspberry Pi Zero

    I’ve been intrigued by the stuff happening in the IoT space over the last 6 months because I’ve been spending considerable amount of time working on an IoT project for work. Yesterday the Raspberry Pi guys put out a new model before the holidays.  A smaller device that costs only $5. A $5 computer. So…

  • Server Security: Lesson #1

    A recent project I have been working on involved a custom built Linux distro running on an ARMv6 piece of hardware. We figured we were fairly immune to getting hacked based on obscure old hardware and pared-down Linux distro. Unfortunately, early in development for ease of working on things we chose a guessable root password.…

  • On Taking Action

    Many years ago I started reading and taking advice from a dating guru. One of the most important things I got out of the material was the frame of mind that being the guy who actually does things and leads by example is critical.  I changed from the guy who doesn’t dance to the one…

  • Next Generation Productivity

    Computers have a long history of replacing the work of humans.  Before mainframes large businesses would have armies of people with punch calculators to do the work that is now in a single spreadsheet (each person performing just a cell of that sheet). Over the past 60 years the primary productivity benefit from computers has…

  • The Bots Are Coming

    Slack is the fastest growing startup in history, and it is starting to drive a new kind of interface for users to make things happen within their businesses. If you remember way back the only way you could interact with a computer was through a command line.  With this interface you form very specific commands…

  • Productivity of higher level languages

    I recently had an experience where I was given the same programming problem as a handful of other software developers.  My advantage was that I was using Python while the other people were forced to write their solution in Java or C. The difference in the amount of time it took to solve the same…

  • Being A World Class Programmer

    A year ago I started on a goal to write and publish code every day to my github account.  That streak lasted for 250 days.  It was a learning experience that gave me time to broaden and deepen my knowledge of Python.  Though the actionable goal was to maintain a streak of activity, the underlying…

  • Going Mobile

    Over the last couple weeks I’ve had a growing concern that my office is just not functional any more.  A standing desk in a room pulling double duty as a spare bedroom. So over the last week I have pulled out all the office equipment and turned the room back into just a bedroom.  The…