Matt Watson

El fin de semana pasado tuve la oportunidad realizar dos sueños a la vez — asistir presencialmente a un retiro de las Comunicadoras Eucarísticas del Padre Celestial en Chandler, Arizona, y volar en avión por primera vez en mi vida.

I have one or two airplane trips coming up soon.

Recientemente he utilizado la IA para la codificación cada vez más.

A few weeks ago, I started learning Ruby and Ruby on Rails for the first time.

I feel particularly blessed this year.

He estudiado español como segunda lengua por al menos 20 años.

I have been using git for about nine years, and these are easily 80% of the commands I ever use, plus some other useful tips.

I’ve been a “slow adopter” of ChatGPT and other LLM products, but I’ve finally gotten to the point where I am using them on a semi-regular basis.

Desde niño he sentido con más fuerza la presencia de Jesús por las noches, justo antes de quedarme dormido, que en cualquier otro momento.

Con profundo pesar, recibí la noticia de que Julio Chojeda Torres falleció el 12 de julio de 2025, a los 76 años.

I was never a sports guy, but through high school and college I managed to stay half-way informed about football and watched at least a few games a year.

I like to hear birds singing.

I’ve never liked stock photos and videos, but AI has made them even worse.

Me he dado cuenta de que hay muchas palabras en español que relaciono con una persona o un evento distinto.

Lately, I’ve had the song “A Long December” by Counting Crows stuck in my head.

I hate the phrase “new normal” and I hate the general way in which COVID or reaction to COVID changed our lives.

Over the last week, I took advantage of the Christmas break to read Dilexit Nos (“He Loved Us”), an encyclical letter by Pope Francis that came out in October of this year.

I just rewatched The Matrix.

Blake picked out this song for me as part of a “song swap” exercise, where we exchange songs we like and share our gut reactions.

Here, I offer some pros and cons to the online Scrabble games I’ve tried and reflect on some ideas I have for making my own Scrabble clone website, and potentially other board games, with friends.

As a web developer who works mainly with PHP, I’ve been experiencing the excruciating slog that is upgrading from version 7.4 to 8+.

I have a love-hate relationship with technology in general and artificial intelligence (AI) in particular.

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged about my personal life, so I figured it’s time for an update.

It took me almost exactly ten months, but I finally finished a great spiritual classic called The Ladder of Divine Ascent by St.

A while back, I read The Spirit of the Liturgy by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, who is now Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI.

During the month of November, my wife Anna and I participated in our second GitHub Game Off challenge, where you have 30 days to build a video game on the platform of your choosing.

My father always sought to teach me to be brave, to learn new things, and to not be too shy or timid, for which I will always be thankful.

I came up with some swanky alternatives to corporatese with English from a bygone era.

Benefits for using a “manually” installed, traditional (L)AMP local development environment.

I got the Pfizer vaccine today.

Our grandmother, whom we have always affectionately called Mimi, taught us a lot throughout our lives.

Today officially marks 10 years for me as a Catholic.

TV will save us from wickedness!

So, I finally switched from Apple to Linux, something I’d been planning to do for a while.

I recently re-watched one of my favorite Coen brothers films, “No Country for Old Men” and liked it so much on this second viewing that I started reading the original novel by Cormac McCarthy.

I discovered the technique of using functionality plugins several months ago and was reluctant at first.

It’s been a long time waiting for a lot of red tape to clear up and a surgery to undergo (one year and four months, to be exact), but today my brother and I finally got our first dose of Spinraza (nusinersen), the first drug approved to treat spinal muscu…

One of the first things I had to do as a newly minted web developer was make elements on the page reactive beyond what I could do with my months of study of JavaScript and jQuery.

I haven’t been updating this blog much for the last two years, partly because it’s a blog and that’s what you do with blogs, and partly because I’ve spent the last two years doing a lot of things and making a lot of changes to my life, personal and profes…

The late French philosopher Rene Girard was known for his theory of mimetic desire — that we desire something after seeing someone else desire it, then fight over it, then find a scapegoat to blame all the aftermath on so that we can go back to being at p…

Lately, I’ve been reading The Harvard Classics when I get a chance, and I am currently on Volume 10, which is The Wealth of Nations, the foundational treatise spelling out the classical principles of free trade and commerce.

I have a confession to make.

There’s an inside joke about the big Methodist church on the corner of Henderson and Siwell, just a couple of minutes from my family’s house in Byram, Mississippi.

This is a question that comes up often between my friends and me.

I know just enough about computers and programming to be dangerous.

I’ve got a lot of projects in the oven right now, including learning French, preparing for what I want to do for a proposal/dissertation, working a content management job, doing creative writing, learning Chinese, going to church like I’m supposed to, etc.

“I well know what temptations are, and that one of the greatest of them is to put it into a man’s head that he can write a book and have it printed, and thereby earn as much fame as money and as much money as fame.” — Miguel de Cervantes (Don Quixote II,…

They say aspartame can kill us.

It sounds like a cheapskate move.

Back years ago, my grandparents used to reminisce about the days when Pawpaw was a traveling ironing board salesman.