Hi, I’m Matouš!

I work as a software engineer at SumUp and do a lot of sports. The rest of my free time is spent on coding, friends, reading, cooking, and other stuff. This blog was started in 2019 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.

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.

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.

Etc.

I keep most of the other cool stuff in my wiki. Here’s distilled content that I thing might be of interest to anyone that stumbled upon this page.

Articles

I am big fan of long format investigative writing. If the author spends the time researching the topic and is able to assimilate accumulated knowledge into a coherent piece writing the topic stops being relevant. This list is longer than I originally intended but I read a lot and there’s just simply a lot of great articles worth mentioning:

• The Clock Is Ticking - Inside the Worst U.S. Maritime Disaster in Decades by William Langewiesche
• The White Darkness - A solitary journey across Antarctica - by David Gran
• A Conspiracy To Kill IE6 - by Chris Zacharias
• “There Is Definite Hanky-Panky Going On” - The Fantastically Profitable Mystery of the Trump Chaos Trades - by William D. Cohan
• Dear Guy Who Just Made My Burrito - A Fictional Letter Written to a Fictional Person About a Real Struggle - oh yes, the famous burrito rant by Jack Dire
• Leave No Soldier Behind - The Unsolved Mystery of the Soldier Who Died in the Watchtower - by William Langewiesche
• The 10-Minute Mecca Stampede That Made History - William Langewiesche
• How to Fairly Divide Talking Time
• Thirty-six Thousand Feet Under the Sea - The explorers who set one of the last meaningful records on earth - by Ben Taub
• 50 Ideas That Changed My Life
• The case of the 500-mile email

Blogroll

• A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry by Dr. Bret C. Devereaux
• Alex Danco
• Alex Miller
• Alexey Guzey
• Amos
• Arun Venkatesan
• Avery Pennarun - Tailscale CEO
• Bartosz Ciechanowski - interactive long form deep dives on engineering topics such as lenses, GPS, etc.
• Charity Majors - Honeycomb CEO
• Christine Dodrill (Xe Iaso)
• Computers Are Bad by J. B. Crawford
• Connor Bär
• Danluu
• Fabien Sanglard
• Gwern Branwen
• Jim Fisher
• Jose Luis Ricon
• Julia Evans - frequent smaller blog posts diving into various technical topics with comicstrips and wit
• Julian D. A. Wiseman
• Kris Machowski
• Lesswrong
• Lucas F. Costa
• Nikita Voloboev, not a blog per se
• Patrick Collison
• Patrick McKenzie and his Bits about Money - a weekly newsletter on the intersection of tech and finance.
• Paul Graham
• Paul Stamatiou
• Sandy Maguire
• Scott Alexander’s Slate Star Codes, newly also Astral Codes Ten
• Stephen Diehl
• Steve Francia
• Tim Bray
• Tom MacWright
• Tynan
• Vitalik Buterin
• Werner Vogels (All Things Distributed)
• Will Larson
• Work In Progress

Quotes

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