From Journeyman to 10x'er
Earlier this year, I started thinking about if it might be time for me to make a career change. I had been at my current company, a growth mode startup, for almost two and a half years, and the company had changed a lot during that time. My life had also changed a lot during that time. And any experienced developer (especially here in Colorado ) gets a lot of messages from recruiters about jobs on…
I’ve been tweaking a few things about this website, so I thought I’d share my learnings with everyone. This blog is powered by the static site generator Jekyll , and it’s completely static. You basically write your posts in Markdown, Jekyll generates a static site from those files, and then the static site can be served up very cheaply & easily from S3/CDN/blob storage of any sort. No server-side…
I was in a reflective mood and noticed that my last post was written way back in late 2017, just before the Great Crypto Crash (!!), so it felt like a good time to post a little update. Remember that hindsight is 20/20, folks. If you’re curious what I’ve been up to since then (I know you are), let me fill you in. Catching Up Since my last post, I took a job at a company called Flowhub , building…
Cryptocurrencies are quickly becoming one of the most talked about phenomenons of all time. Opinions vary widely, and it’s hard for even the most technical minded person to fully grasp how they work, let alone why they have value, but there’s no doubt that the concept is captivating, being described as a “brain virus” by some in Silicon Valley. And honestly, a large part of the reason it’s…
For those looking for a TL;DR: here’s the list In my last post , I talked about my plan to revisit an old side project of mine and begin development anew. The project is a Chrome extension called Simple Blocker that I started back in 2013. My first order of business was to fix a minor but long outstanding bug a few users had complained about, and my second order of business was to revamp the…
Returning to long abandoned software project months or years after your last commit can be a daunting task. I should know - in my short career developing software I’ve left countless projects hanging. Some were left after the first commit, once I realized the idea just wasn’t going to pan out. Others were fortunate enough to be left in a “mature” state after a flurry of work, yet lack…
It’s hard to believe that it’s been over a year since the last time I posted something to MattVukas.com . I’m still alive, don’t worry. I guess life has just gotten in the way of publishing anything longer than a tweet or collection of pictures on Facebook. Web hosting issues have caused some headaches as well, but that is sorted out now. Since my last post on 7/8/2014 , a lot has happened in my…
Tumblr and blogging newcomer Medium are taking the online publishing world by storm. Yahoo purchased Tumblr for over $1 billion last year, and Medium is picking up steam, led by two co-founders of Twitter. I figured this would be a fitting topic to write about for my first post on Medium. Here's the link: Medium, Tumblr, and the re-consolidation of online publishing I'm not sure how I'm going to…
Eric Schmidt once said that, “The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn't understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.” I think that this is as accurate of a statement as any about the nature of the Internet, even today. In the 1990s, the Internet went through a period of commercial whitewashing. What was once limited to academia,…
Level 3 Communications recently published an excellent article on their blog titled "Chicken" . The article scratches the surface of a well-known problem whereby ISPs abuse their monopoly power controlling the "last-mile" of Internet connectivity, or the connection from a regional fiber backbone to a neighborhood or house. Since ISPs have so much market power, they deliberately allow their…