Jacques Mattheij

It could easily be the title of a Peter Greenaway movie.

When you submit a sample for genetic analysis you are not just making a decision for yourself.

I’ve been wondering for a long time what exactly the added value of Google+ is to Google, and why it is that they are pushing it as hard as they do.

Lisp programmers should stop reading right now because they’ll likely suffer severe injury of the jaw muscles as they laugh themselves silly at how hard it is to do some things in C.

The second part of this mini guide. the first part is here: http://jacquesmattheij.com/Due+Diligence+survival+guide .

If you plan to go and do your own company, or a company together with a bunch of buddies or some other wild thing you plan then I want you to realize this to the core of your being or you probably should not even start until you do: you very likely will f…

As usual I get a ton of mail on subjects that are controversial.

If you came in to information technology from the ‘soft’ side and you view a computer as a chunk of black magic that allows your screen, keyboard and network connection to function and you are curious about what goes on inside then this article is for you.

Admitting that may be career suicide, or possibly it will cost me dearly because ‘software engineers’ are raking in the big bucks these days, but the fact of the matter is that I’m a programmer.

The following piece pre-supposes that if you are in school or university you’re doing so to learn something that is: a) useful b) a marketable skill c) does not put you in debt for the next 50 years even if you do graduate d) is something that you actually

Me, I blame the IDEs.

Web developers the world over are always terminally worried about whether or not their application will scale orders of magnitude without keeling over.

A while ago I got into an argument about ‘heroes’.

Recently I came upon a post on hacker news about a man that had quit his job and that recounted his failure, after a full six months. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?

On http://www.takethislollipop.com/ there is a nice little movie that shows you what the implications of enabling a facebook app could be in a way that is hard to ignore.

Until I was 30 the word ‘headache’ didn’t even exist for me.

Since a day or so the google cache links are gone.

I love reading papers and books about computer science.

For many business people that go ‘the long way to success’ with a software development background (see http://jacquesmattheij.com/three+roads+to+the+top+of+the+mountain)) there is a natural progression of advancement: being employed consulting product dev…

With some astonishment I’ve been reading through the terms of service of the google wallet system, which is rumored to launch today. http://www.google.com/wallet/privacy.html The basic idea here is that google will have access to your full payment history,

Of all the publicly aired dirty laundry slugfests the message by Paul Carr in his resignation last week was one of the worst ever.

Over the years I’ve read in quite a few places that programmers are somehow ‘special’, that there is something unique about the ability to program, and that if you haven’t got that (whatever it is) that you won’t make the cut.

For a start-up one of the most critical single numbers is ‘cash on hand’ (well, that goes for most companies but for a start-up it is even more critical because there is no income stream yet to match expenses in the pre-launch phase).

The Unofficial Hacker News FAQ The Official FAQ is here: http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html Here is a small sample of stuff that pops up with some regularity, if you want me to add entries please mail me jacques@mattheij.com, if you ask a question that is

When Acorn won the contract to produce the ‘BBC Micro computer’ I’m fairly sure they never knew what influence their creation would have on the generation of kids that had these as their first computer, either at home, a friends place or in school.

When you are running a successful start-up company and you have the choice between attracting outside capital and growing organically there are lots of things to consider.

What is due diligence?

A friend of mine in the Dutch small town of IJmuiden (on the coast, mostly known for its huge steel mills) asked me if I wanted to relieve him of an old player piano sitting on the first floor.

Developers tend to like their machines as big and as fast as they can get them.

Sometimes I can’t sleep at night with silly questions keeping me up.

I decided to see if I could sell some of my domains, and picked SEDO because they are pretty visible.

A couple of years ago, one sweltering hot afternoon in Toronto I was visiting a friend, a long time internet entrepreneur named Richard.

This is nice example of how not to deal with feedback on your software: http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?

Introduction With more and more people getting on the online start-up bandwagon and with greater numbers of them than ever before doing this for the very first time I feel there is a need for a ‘code of conduct and ethics’, to make sure that people and co…

Just today while reading some code I came upon the following little gem: assert(someinitialization() == FALSE); In code that has been in production for a long time but that exhibited subtle bugs, which mysteriously vanished whenever someone tried to debug…

When I was a kid and for the first time interested in electronics (to me that meant anything that did not involve just wires, switches, batteries and lamps) we were just coming out of the ‘tube’ era in to the solid state era.

Every now and then technology makes a quantum leap while you’re not paying attention and then it seems as though you’re living in the future when you finally ‘get the news’.

For the last two months I’ve been working on re-factoring a big chunk of C code.

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been pretty quiet on the blog.

Education is one of the most important things that we as a society are engaging in, in part because it ensures the transfer of knowledge from one generation to the next, but also because it sets the direction for all possible future paths for our society.

Today it is exactly 12 1⁄2 years ago that one of the great leaders of our world died.

Living with a programmer must be a pretty frustrating experience.

Interesting developments on Hacker News, the comment scores are no longer visible and there is a concerted effort at trying to preserve the perceived quality and the atmosphere of the place in spite of very rapid growth.

In this http://news.ycombinator.com/item?

I’m a data junkie, I have to confess to that.

When MSX and Atari ST were still ‘hot’, I contracted for a short while for a game company in the Netherlands, called Aackosoft, in Leiderdorp, a small town near The Hague.

img.alignright {float:right; margin:0 0 1em 1em} a img.alignright {float:right; margin:0 0 1em 1em} [img 00:24] Startup School Transcript October 16 2010 Brian Chesky - Founder, Airbnb Link to video: http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/272180383 [img 00:…

Apologies for the tone of this piece but I’m pretty angry right now.

Meet the Myriad Group. 3.7 Billion apps shipped to over 2.2 billion phones.

The hallmarks of a bubble in tech are many, but in general, it is agreed upon that: high valuations without corresponding track records, an increase in the number of deals, lots of hype, media frenzy, turnover and profits no longer matter, the prices of '…