Success Via Failure

Lately, I have found myself learning a lot by screwing up. Specifically, when coding. (Though, as I write this, my wife and I have a 3-month old son, Jack. She might disagree with me scoping this idea to coding. He might as well.)

Recently, I started down the proverbial rabbit-hole trying to speed things up in the financials for LaunchPlan. However, I had to scrap all of my initial code and write off a several hours of effort too. But, I did eventually get to my goal, and I learned quite a bit along the way.

I was trying to speed up a Key-Value store that was currently residing inside a relational SQL database. Actually, I had this thought in the back of my mind for quite a while. The trigger to try to attack this came recently after I read an article comparing Redis, Memcached, and MongoDb. This article got me thinking: Redis could be a perfect solution for this – and I could implement it at the data layer and keep things clean and pretty simple. Continue Reading

Secrecy and Privacy are not the same thing

I just watched an interesting video:

It is about the NSA betraying the world’s trust and it got me thinking: I’m not sure people understand the difference between secrecy and privacy. It seems that with the Snowden revelations in the news we hear this common acceptance of being monitored because “I have nothing to hide.”

For most of us this is probably the case – we aren’t doing something in secret that is illegal. We do not have anything to hide. But that’s not privacy. Privacy is not publishing conversations with friends – not because you are planning something mischievous, but because it’s a private conversation and nobody else’s business. Continue Reading

Stop it right now. Debt isn’t always Bad!

As a society we seem to have developed a hatred for debt since the economy nearly suffocated in 2008. Now clearly, when you have a choice between using debt and not using debt, the choice is probably clear. And debt can be bad when abused, but it’s not absolutely bad. Milk is good for your bones, but try to drink a gallon at once and see what happens. It drives me crazy that so many perspectives today are a reaction to the extreme case and not the normal case. I think debt is another victim of this type of thinking. Continue Reading

Stagnating Wages? It’s much worse than that.

I don’t want to say I told you so back in August, 2010 when I wrote Stay Above the Median, but…I told you so. They used much better visuals in this video than I have the capability to create – and it tells this story over a broader timeframe – so here is a great little clip from Inequality for All:

I am not a good writer, but I learned this

I don’t think I’m a great writer. When I finish writing I usually don’t have the patience to go back to proofread. Once I’m done writing, I am done. Ready to move on to something else. It’s been this way since grade school and I am, for certain, a creature of habit.

I do, however, enjoy learning new words. Like up at the top of this blog: “précis.” It pretty much means summary – and more importantly for my site – it starts with a “p.” I’m always trying to expand my vocabulary and those sorts of things.

Anyway, when I talked recently about building a personal brand, I realized that building the brand that is “Matt Chepeleff” is more important. After all, part of my brand is a 6.4 out of 10 ranking as a writer – and that’s fine with me.

I did recently learn, however, one bit of knowledge from the world of writing that had always confused me. Continue Reading