Kontroversial Keith

Kontroversial Keith: Saying It and Meaning It.

  • Tech Stories: The DBA’s Dream Database

    Back when I worked for the people search company out in Playa Vista, I met a DBA who was pretty condescending towards the developers. You have to understand back then, DBAs had significantly a lot more power since many companies were using Oracle for their core backend. A good DBA usually were certified and could…

  • Tech Stories: Hidden Toxicity

    One of my favorite companies I worked for was the aforementioned race parts ecommerce company over in Irvine. At the start, it was friendly, had a sense of work/life balance and low pressure. That began to change once the company’s investors began pushing to hire big time with a target goal of around 200 people.…

  • Tech Stories: The Rich Boy Contractor Who Did No Work

    After the race parts company, I ended up doing some contract work for a person search site. This was probably around the height of the dot com boom in terms of how much money was floating around and companies were in no slow down of finding people to flood their ranks with the enormous competition…

  • 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: Stay Focused in Your Interviews

    After graduating college, I was idealistic with big hopes and dreams. The problem when you’re a big dreamer with high hopes from life is that you easily can get all of that crushed by the harsh reality of moving out of the academic environment that has been so neatly organized for you into the more…

  • 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…

  • Los Angeles Should Build A Metro Line Along the Coast

    Quite often, I’ll rip into Los Angeles in terms of its lack of planning or poor management as a city. But the thing that should be obvious by everyone who isn’t a selfish beach house living asshole is that Los Angeles is in dire need of a Metro line that runs along the coast. Perhaps,…