Kontroversial Keith

Category: technology

  • Tech Stories: A Conversation With Randal Schwartz

    If you’ve never heard of Randal Schwartz, you’ve probably never had to deal with Perl. But if you’re an experienced Perl programmer there’s a good chance you would have run into this guy’s name at some point in your career. He’s one of the original Perl gods and famous (or infamous) for the Schwartzian Transform.…

  • Tech Stories: The Early Ad Click Scam

    After working at the shady warehouse over in Irvine, I switched to an ecommerce company dealing mostly with racing parts. The margins were higher (according to the CTO and founder) which would make the business a little more profitable. Regardless, these parts were being cataloged by a team of data entry people located on the…

  • Tech Stories: You Know Computer Science Therefore You Know Linux

    One of the first jobs I worked where I was trying to build up my resume was a small chop-shop over in Mission Viejo editing simple HTML for an online document system. It was my first “real” job outside of college where I would get to sink my teeth into doing something semi-related with the…

  • Tech Stories: Just Because You Ran A Market Doesn’t Mean You Can Run A Tech Shop

    The title seems quite obvious. Experience tends to trump being too idealistic. But for some reason that doesn’t stop the mad people entering into the tech field who have little to no technical background from starting a business. Sometimes a few get lucky and manage to scrap together a team that creates an unbelievable product.…

  • Tech Stories: New Feature and Time Traveling!

    So while driving to work today, I started realizing that I simply have way too many stories from working in the tech industry for the past 18+ years. I’ve been musing over how to disperse them in some format. Should I write a story? An autobiography? Snippets to Scott Adams? Of course, the best answer…

  • Why Online Content (Publishing) is A Shitty Business Model

    Earlier, I read an article that talked about how Medium will do a pretty big layoff and close a few offices around the country. Medium describes itself as a publishing platform and allows people to “have their voices heard.” Yet from a superficial viewpoint, I can’t see what their platform does that a simple WordPress…

  • Why I’m Slowly Moving Away from Social Media

    When social media sites like Friendster, Myspace, Facebook, etc. came out, I was ecstatic. As a web developer, I was excited to see a new incarnation of technological possibilities that could help my career. Over time, these platforms devolved from technology solutions and communication platforms to ad-centric spam hosts and spyware for marketing people. Worse…

  • Why Instagram Might Be the Best Social Media Platform Around

    Social media is almost like a perverse version of The Force from Star Wars in that it, “It’s an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us; it binds the galaxy together.” Unfortunately, it’s so pervasive and intrusive that it’s become supremely annoying and an opportunity for marketers to continue…

  • How to Have A Clean Twitter Feed

    I know a lot of people who dislike Twitter; the interface is a little wonky, the feed becomes unbearably difficult to follow and tons of useless ads. Also, the endless retweets of subjects and people that probably disgusts you flood your feed with even more junk. How can you clean this up? How can you…

  • Yahoo Sold Off to Verizon and What It Means

    Marissa Mayer arguably did her job when she finally found a willing buyer for Yahoo in Verizon. Already, Yahoo had been tossing assets overboard in trying to make themselves attractive. Even the few strategic buys like tumblr proved fruitless over time in an effort to stay independently afloat. Thus, the real exit strategy in a…