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:
-
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
Senior Software Engineer @ SumUp, 6/2021 - now
Working in the Platform Tribe - Identity Squad along with a 10 incredible teammates. The IAM (Identity & Access Management) team had its inception 2 months before I joined SumUp and became fully staffed only in the summer of 2022 after a series of incidents. In the 2 years so far we have build company-wide SSO (Single Sign-On) based on OIDC and OAuth2. Once the platform was stablized we worked (and still) do on MFA (Multi-Factor Authentication), API Gateways, request signing, and most importantly fixing and cleaning a lot of legacy code.
Apart from the IAM related responsibilities I spend some time on our public APIs, traffic, and RFCs.
Golang Backend Developer @ Kiwi.com, 2/2019 - 5/2021
Developing core infrastructure and services with speed and maintainability as the primary goal. Growing my experience and knowledge thanks to awesome team and mentorship from other skilled people in the company. Slowly taking more responsibility and bigger tasks such as initiating gRPC adoption across the company, helping build internal golang packages for cross-team usage, and developing multiple internal core APIs with high availability and stability demand.DevOps and Technical Support for Ads Systems @ FTV Prima, 9/2018 - 1/2019
Technical support for online platform advertisement team. Helping with every possible task at hand, so mostly scripting and data pipelines.Full-Stack Developer @ Techambition Ltd., 9/2017 - 5/2018
Full-stack developer (Node.js and React) of an online interactive tool for high school mathematics in a small startup.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
So many articles by William Langewiesche…
I will be fully honest here, absolutely anything by William Langewiesche is a pure masterpiece. If you love investigative, thrilling writing go ahead and read all Williams articles on Vanityfair. Disclaimer, you will want more!Blogroll
- A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry by Dr. Bret C. Devereaux
- Alex Danco
- Alex Miller
- Alexey Guzey
- Amos
- Arun Venkatesan
- Bartosz Ciechanowski - interactive long form deep dives on engineering topics such as lenses, GPS, etc.
- 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
- Kris Machowski
- Lesswrong
- Lucas F. Costa
- Nikita Voloboev, not a blog per se
- 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
- Will Larson
- Work In Progress
- Xe Iaso
- Julian D. A. Wiseman
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