≡ Matous Dzivjak

Hi, I’m Matouš!

I work as a software engineer at SumUp and do a lot of sports. I am currently training for my first Ironman and an Ultramarathon. I run and cycle a lot but I’m neglecting the swimming. I do plenty of other sports too, like backcountry skiing, climbing, and anything else that I find enjoyable.

The rest of my free time is spent on coding, reading, cooking, and other stuff. In 2019 I also started this blog to force myself into writing more and to have a place where I could share my thoughts and knowledge. Please take this whole site with grain of salt as my english is far from perfect, and I feel like creating a coherent piece of writing is still impossible task for me (I am working on it though).

Philosophy

I am pragmatic optimist, ISTJ-A (Logistician) personality type according to Myers–Briggs Type Indicator. ISTJ can be split into 4 individual traits, Introverted, Observant, Thinking, and Judging. The -A suffix at the end stands for Assertive. I highly recommend trying the 16 personalities test youtself, while not tentative I find the insights helpful in learning more about yourself.

To greater or lesser extend I identify with following philosophies:

• Stoicism

  The core teachings of Stoicism focus on the development of self-control and resilience in the face of life’s difficulties, and emphasize the importance of living in accordance with reason. Stoics believe that the key to a happy and fulfilling life is to focus on what is within our control, and to cultivate inner peace by accepting the things that are outside our control. They also believe in living a virtuous life, and see wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance as the four cardinal virtues.

• Hedonism, specifically Epicurean Hedonism

  Hedonism refers to a family of theories, all of which have in common that pleasure plays a central role in them. Psychological or motivational hedonism claims that human behavior is determined by desires to increase pleasure and to decrease pain.

  Hedonism is a viewpoint that pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain is the highest good and the proper aim of human life. This can involve the enjoyment of physical sensations, emotional fulfillment, and the attainment of desired experiences and material goods. Epicurean Hedonism further extends this believe to emphasize the importance of balancing pleasure with avoiding pain and discomfort, and views the attainment of long-term happiness as the ultimate goal (whereas Cyrenaic Hedonism prioritizes immediate pleasure regardless of the long-term consequences or impact on well-being).

Career

Projects

I enjoy programming outside the work as well and have build and still maintain a few personal projects:

• go-nanoid - Tiny golang package for generating URL friendly unique IDs.
• Mnemoname - tiny golang utility for generating mnemonic names.
• ezmail - easy CLI utility for sending emails from terminal useful for scripts and people that don’t want to set up the default mail command that saves credentials into secure enclave.
• dzxcodes - this website, using the Hugo framework.
• linkfix - a simple tool that helps you avoid the Link rot by reporting on no-longer working links in your files and suggesting replacements with Wayback Machine snapshots wherever possible.
• newz - News aggregator inspired by HN and Reddit written in python.
• godox - tool to extract specific comments from Go code based on keywords. Later integrated into the Golangci Lint.
• gosmtp - golang implementation of full-featured, lightweight and RFC compliant SMTP server.

I also contribute to a few open source projects:

• helix - A post-modern modal text editor written in Rust.
• hydra - OpenID Certified™ OpenID Connect and OAuth Provider written in Go.

I am most likely destined for average life, which is completely fine. If you zoom out further and it becomes pretty hard to view this tiny spec of time we’ve given and all its trappings as anything more than ridiculous. You could become the most famous person in all of human history, build empires, construct massive monuments to your achievement, etch your damn face into the earth with a laser in space… and you’d still have just as much importance, in the scale of time and space, as every human that ever lived. Zero.¹

Achievements