Jacques Mattheij

So, you’re about to be hired by that hot new startup.

In this post I’m going to try to give potential and actual CEO’s (and other C level execs to some extent) some actionable advice when it comes to how they conduct themselves in the hope that this will at some future date save some of you a great deal of m…

For a very brief (way too brief) time the world was a much better place.

There lots of products that came to market in the recent past and that will come to market in the near future that use some kind of cloud hosted component.

Volkwagen is a house in deep trouble.

My credentials in the wind industry are just about ‘0’, the only reason I’m writing this is because I’ve been a life-long wind power enthusiast, I’ve built (a prototype 2.5 KW 5 meter wind turbine and have a basic understanding of how wind power works and…

A while ago I received an invitation to a high-school reunion.

One of the hotter topics of discussion at the moment is ‘The Right To Be Forgotten’.

It seems to be the only thing that web millionaire wanna-be’s care about is growth.

Before ‘HTTP’, whenever a new kind of application was invented (say ‘file sharing’, or ‘address book’ or ‘messaging’) someone would sit down with a bunch of others and would discuss this problem at some length.

Update: James Hague, aka Dadgum was inspired by this to do some work on his blog and I’m happy to report that now his blog is the fastest blog in the world, 4K transferred and 1 request per page, load time < 75 ms.

Divide and Conquer is a name given to a group of algorithms that take a problem and then solves it recursively (recursion is a programming concept where a program uses a simpler version of itself, a bit like those Matroshka dolls).

Computer programmers are a weird bunch.

There’s a war going on and your head has been designated the battleground.

Of all the privacy violating tracking methods on the web there are two that are particularly bad, the first one is called ‘evercookies’ for being particularly hard to get rid of, the other is called Browser Fingerprinting and is impossible to detect.

It started a couple of years ago, became fashionable last year and it’s become just about unavoidable now: the plague of the ‘customer satisfaction survey’.

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve run some analysis on the one million most popular sites on the web.

In the how to sell your company article I wrote at length on the process of how to go about selling your company once you’re ready for that.

What you see is what you get was a way to distinguish between word processors and layout software that used ‘markup’ and those that allowed you to interactively manipulate your documents in an on-screen representation of what the final output would look l…

The Past Since 1851 Amsterdam had a registry that recorded the following innocent pieces of data about the residents: Name, Date of birth, Address, Marital Status, Parents, Profession, Religion, Previous Addresses and Date of Death if deceased.

I’m not a gmail customer in the normal sense.

According to this article in ‘Der Spiegel (German)’ Deutsche Telekom (the largest German telecommunications infrastructure operator) aided the BND (the German intelligence service, the ‘Bundes Nachrichten Dienst’) in tapping internet connections to Austri…

Recruiters are not my most favorite people in the tech eco-system.

So, it has finally happened.

The lever, the transistor, the vacuum tube and the computer all have something in common.

Hard to believe, but the most frequently encountered ‘to-fix’ during due-diligence has to do with what you’d think would be a formality: having proper backups.

Almost every first world country has them: A legion of newly minted companies with just one person active in the company.

This post has been re-written several times, so please forgive me if it does not come across as coherent as I would like to.

Programmers tend to loathe writing bookkeeping software.

Paul Simon has a song called ‘One Trick Pony’ with a bit in it that goes like this: He’s a one trick pony One trick is all that horse can do he does one trick only It’s the principal source of his revenue In the world of programming being a one-trick-pony…

I often get the question what it is exactly that I do for a living and usually I can’t really talk about it due to non-disclosure agreements and possible fall-out but in this case I got permission to do a write-up of my most recent job.

Bad consultants make money off their customers, good consultants make money for their customers.

Disclaimer: the cancer analogy is in no way meant to cause mental grief to anybody, I’ve lost enough family members to it that I realise such an analogy may be a step too far for some, but I feel that in this case its use is justified.

When telephones were still solidly connected to the wall, either by being bolted on to it or by an umbilical (sometimes consisting of one or more phone extension cords) it was pretty clear who owned them, the phone company did.

After looking over many advertisements for all kinds of super nice looking vehicles I’ve decided to go with this baby: It was custom built for me by my eldest son, he spent a ton of time on it and the result is really quite nice.

One of the oldest business sayings that stuck into my head was ‘Time is Money.’.

In case you’re tuning in late, the previous installment in this series is here.

For many years I was a ‘bulkregister’ customer, I landed there after Network Solutions went mad.

In case you landed here without any context and have no idea who I am or what this article is about this article should give you some background.

A recent comment on Hacker News gives a little bit of insight into how charities and non-profits determine who to target for donations and how they deal with requests for removal from marketing lists.

There seems to be some kind of misunderstanding about the Google Search/Web History disable switch that google provides to its more privacy conscious users.

After creating a short-list of languages and frameworks to be evaluated (see here for the first installment in this series) the next step is going to be a lot harder.

In this HN thread I commented on how the story about the People’s Republic of Donetsk reminded me of my days in communist Poland.

Disruption is something that you can usually only establish after the fact.

Learning Romanian is rapidly turning into a huge exercise in Yak-Shaving.

I currently find myself living in Romania for a bit.

The employer of one of my coding heroes, John Carmack is currently being sued by ZeniMax over unspecified IP that he may or may not have taken with him to his new spot.

One of the most interesting architectures to come out of the 1980’s was the Inmos Transputer.

In January I came up with a weird idea, to go and visit total strangers in return for ‘food and board’ in order to do useful work for them.

In the past, the various professions were organized as guilds.