Testimony While I was working at Boxkite Media in Athens, I would occasionally get some pretty humorous assignments. One of these was converting a PHP application we had written, and designed to run on Linux, into a PHP application that would run just as well on a Windows server with PHP installed. If I recall correctly, we ended up performing that conversion for our client at a loss. We lost their yearly hosting revenue, and I don’t think we ever broke even on the amount of work that was required to do the conversion. I don’t recall now the reason the client wanted that change done, whether it was for pure financial reasons or something else, but I do remember that it was an obnoxious situation from an engineering point of view. Posted by Matt Farmer on February 02, 2014 · 4 mins read
January 2014 Update on GAODP Hallo folks! It’s been a minute since I updated you guys on what’s going on with the Georgia Open Data Project. Posted by Matt Farmer on January 25, 2014 · 5 mins read
Observations of a First Time Business Owner In 2013 I was a bona fide business owner for the first time in my life. Of course, by bona fide business owner I mean that I had to pay estimated taxes this year because of the income that wasn’t coming from someone who was withholding my taxes from a paycheck on my behalf. That’s right, I had to deal with the terrifying 1040-ES. In addition to that, this year was my first tango at setting up what will be my proper side company moving forward: Crazy Goat Creative. Posted by Matt Farmer on January 20, 2014 · 6 mins read
The Investment Vehicle Consultancy Lately I’ve been playing with the idea of a new type of consultancy. Tangental to this idea, there’s been a lot of thoughts around the current state of the technology industry simmering in my head. Particularly following the blog post from Groove about turning down the $5 million in VC money, I realized that the people who make that call aren’t near loud enough. Posted by Matt Farmer on December 02, 2013 · 11 mins read
Announcing Deploy Goon It is with great pleasure that I am able to formally announce the feature complete release of my latest open source gadget, Deploy Goon. I just released version 1.0.0 out to npm tonight and aside from one bug related to the CLI that I haven’t been able to pin down, it’s fully functional. Hopefully I get to nail down that bug soon and release a patch, but I didn’t want to wait on the announcement of 1.0.0. I’m impatient. Posted by Matt Farmer on November 17, 2013 · 1 min read