John Mathews Blog

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Posts

Blog Microfeatures

How to be successful

Murphy's Laws of Combat Operations

Hacking Millions of Modems (and Investigating Who Hacked My Modem)

Running A Business Changes The Way You Think

I love my wife. My wife is dead (1946)

What factors explain the nature of software?

Understandable Software

Tooling for large teams

Tmux resurrect - restore a particular session

Life Lessons from the Death Bed

DALL-E 3 Prompt Engineering

Stories about big decisions

20 lessons from the 20th century

Free to not do a thing

Thoughts on the Fujifilm x100v

Content Creation: Things I learned The Hard Way

The Simplest Math Problem No One Can Solve

Recommended finance books

Bootstrapped SaaS

Deep Dive into GarminOS and its MonkeyC Virtual Machine

MacOS Keyboard Shortcuts for Developers

Photographer: Léonard Misonne

A short 100 question diligence checklist

Sparks of General Intelligence

AI prompt engineering

Chat GPT prompt engineering

Thinking about risk

Who becomes an entrepreneur?

Using AI for social media content creation.

Photographer: Willem Verbeek

Photographer: Esther Brown

Six Types of Wealth

The Case for Travelling More

Lessons from history in tackling climate change

Most Data Work Seems Fundamentally Worthless

High levels of bitcoin dormancy

Elitism as the mid-career growth engine

What is an engineering strategy

Childhoods of exceptional people

The sleeping beauty problem

Is success luck or hardwork?

Letter to 15 year old me

Everything you can't have

Money is a negative art

How to learn another language

My Neovim setup in 2023

Fun, Fear, Pain, Accomplishment

ZSA Moonlander Review

The Impact of a Coin Toss on Major Life Decisions

Neovim plugins I could make

Ben Howard - The End of the Affair

All that is gold does not glitter

Insanity workouts

Photographer: Fan Ho

Photographer: Robert Doisneau

Three Falls in the Alps

Learnings from 5 years of tech startup code audits

Don't avoid sunlight

Data Science Teams

Newish Command-Line Tools

Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid

MacOS Keyboard Shortcuts

Advanced googling

Dan Lebrero book notes

Someone else's guiding principles after 20 years of programming

Personal website as a mini-game

Founder Salaries

James' Book Summaries

Django CBV method flowchart

Tools to help children learn to code

How to size bets

Managing environment variables with Direnv

Adding italic text to iTerm2

The Psychology of Computer Programming

How to write a book

103 attempts to make it work

Gell-Mann amnesia effect

How to monetize a SaaS

First five minutes on a server

Adding JSON output to a CLI app

Chezmoi: Part 2

Powerful Python

Multi-tenant Django webapps

The 3-2-1 backup rule

Lessons from creating a production database

Japanese philosophies for spending money

Uninstall all pip packages

Zsh commands: exec vs source

Chezmoi commands

zsh suspend or push function

Math explainers

Do-nothing scripts

Virtual environments and python versions

SaaS metrics that matter

Naming things is hard

Tove Lo - Habits

Understanding all of Python, through its built-ins

Logging Best Practices

Counter intuitive facts

How to get rich without getting lucky

Ultra-running benchmarks

Vim built-in color names

Lightning network point-of-sale

Linux performance analysis in 60 seconds

Stop reading the news

View and change settings for GCloud CLI

Google Cloud Storage - TTL and CORS settings

Handwritten letters at scale

The dangers of social media

Visual mathematical proofs

1 Peter 1 vs 10

9/11 and the American psyche

How doctors die

Cloud Functions Minimum Instances

Understanding GCP charges

My dead dad's journal

Conditionally setting your git config

Daddy-Daughter To-Do List

Elon Musk's Engineering Philosophy

Pen-testing web apps

Running through adversity

Starbase Tour with Elon Musk

Athletes, Careers, and Mental Health

Heuristics for effective software development

Start with Finance to transform IT

The Worst Volume Control UI

Playing with Google Cloud Platform

Upgrading Cryptographic Libraries

Startup Engineering Lessons

Poisson's Equation

Can an explanation of an historical event ever be completely true?

Load-testing my Web Analytics Tool

Edward Hopper's Paintings

Some experiences can be taught, but some must be lived

Georges St-Pierre Training Meta

Validating CloudFlare analytics

I would like to take some time to explore what it means to be alive

Believe half of what you see and now't of what you hear.

Django for Startup Founders

Building my own web analytics

Bifurcation Theory

Apple's iCloud+ "VPN"

Design Patterns

Coding exercise for a technical interview

Foxes and Hedgehogs

Pair programming using Vim

Man swallowed by whale

Your .bashrc doesn't have to be a mess

John Kelly finishing the 2017 Barkley Marathons.

A Project of One's Own

Choose Boring Technology

An incomplete list of skills senior engineers need

Performance Optimizations for the shell prompt

Vim spellcheck commands

Questions for good references

Lessons from 45 years in the software industry

Modeling Credit Risk

Grep only inside particular files

View a List of Keyboard Mappings in Vim

Building A Story Brand

Training → Knowledge → Confidence → Victory

Nested Auto Commands for Overriding Colorschemes

See where Vim is setting an option

My Life Expectancy

Vimscript functions

Better Text Objects

Delete stuff in Vim without leaving insert mode

Vim register for yanked text

ChezMoi shortcuts

Bash Strict Mode

How to write an About Page

Domain Name Registrars

The Honest Troubleshooting Code of Conduct

Linux Filesystem Hierarchy Standard

Browser Security

Remote Procedure Calls

An interesting blog

Ranger File Manager

Where and when will the current Bitcoin market peak?

All Known Locations of an Executable

Reading - April 2021

Learning - April 2021

Tweets - April 2021

Reorganize tmux windows

The trouble with climbing higher is that eventually you lose sight of the ground.

I Leaked Credentials Onto A Public GitHub Repo

Adding Keyboard Navigation

Socially Acceptable Mistakes

`du` is a tool for showing disk usage.

Safe Bash Scripting

Running a Binary in Debian

Over-Engineering this blog

Creating Slowly

Arrow syntax in bash

Pretty print JSON

Vim: GoTo Tag Definition

Useful Business

Frantic Distraction

Rearrange splits in Vim

Pelican Plugin Guide

Read and Write the Same File in Bash

Docker Commands

Pipe a Script File into Bash

Split Long Strings

Teaching Kids About Money

Stop Prepending sudo to Docker Commands

`cat` and a new line

Cardano: Generating Addresses

Creating Users With Sudo Permissions

Two Years Of Vim

Disk Full and Disk Usage Commands

Binance-Chain: Running a node

Shell Comparisons

nohup and Background Processes

File Descriptors and /dev/null

Cardano: Running a full node

Polkadot: Running and interacting with a full node

Microservices, Docker, Azure

Regrets Of The Dying

A List Of Unconnected Thoughts And Aphorisms

Notes From An Interview With Geoffrey Hinton

Questions For Interesting Conversations

Portfolio: Image Recognition

Notes From "Mastering Vim Quickly"

Notes From "Powerful Python"

Mental Models I Used To Use

What's So Different About Now

Predicting the Future using Human Nature and Technology

Financial Doom And Gloom

Debugging the more_categories plugin for Pelican

Different Views For Different Users

3 Different Types Of Programming Problems

Why I Want To Write Regularly

Python: Becoming A Better Python Developer

Using Vim with large codebases

Notes on learning Django

Data Science vs Web Development: Larger Code Bases

Test Driven Development

Why Talk About Jesus?

API Design Principles

Principles Of Object Orientated Programming

Optimizing The Performance Of This Blog

Unix: Utilities To Analyse And Update Multiple Text Files

A New Blog Design

Product-Led Growth

Obviously Awesome

How I learnt to code

Dreaming of Emacs

The 1-Page Marketing Plan

Learning to market

Founders Journal 3

Founders Journal 2

Founders Journal 1

Between Clients

Analysis of the mean and median value of transactions on 5 Blockchains

Bitcoin Lightning

Sync a BTC node, quickly

Prediction Markets

Reading: April 2018

Ry's Git Tutorial

The Bitcoin Lightning Network

How to buy Bitcoin

Live near the ocean

Bitcoin compared to gold

Hardware Wallets

Trading digital assets

I'm a chartered accountant

Coworking in Dublin

Create a Multi-Signature Ethereum wallet using Parity

Macro Analysis of the Bitcoin Blockchain

Corporate London

Blockchains from the ground up: Part 2

Understanding VC Investment

How to be an ambitious founder in Europe

The Lisbon Investment Summit

Blogging with Pelican: Design, Plugins, Sharing

Blockchains from the ground up: Part 1

London Rent vs. London Salaries

Introduction to the Æternity blockchain project

The Æternity ICO: My experience

Blogging with Pelican

Analysing a personal library

FakeGL: A Synthetic General Ledger and Trial Balance

Reconciliation of a trial balance to a general ledger

Spotify song history

Autumn, BIN and $PATH

Introduction to my doctorate research - Silos

Digital currencies: the basics

Übersicht widget: Time Until

How to wake up early

Jupyter (iPython) notebooks + Pandas

Coursera's "Data Science Specialisation"

Übersicht widget: Time Since