Mateusz Viste

homepage

My name is Mateusz and I am a software architect. I used to live in a rural area of northern Poland during my youth, nowadays I reside in the countryside of central France. I value minimalism as a way of life, but that you already guessed from the look of this website.

Hobbies

I enjoy writing open-source software in my spare time - mostly related to retro-computing, but not only. I also run a modest gopherspace node (this is a gopher link, your browser probably won't know how to handle it).

I keep most of my open-source projects on sourceforge. I also have some minor code bits on github - that's only because I once noticed that cool kids were using this and I wanted to try, too, but I'm not terribly fond of it. In essence, I don't like git.

Among the few things that keep me interested are Soay sheep. I find sheep to be very nice people. Remarkably wise, too. I also enjoy natural beekeeping and occasionally like to whistle on my svirel, although I am not very good at it.

There's also this youtube thing where I operate a couple of channels (1, 2, 3), but I don't use it that much since I largely prefer reading rather than watching.

Professional life

In the past I met a talented entrepreneur. Together, we have founded an IT startup where I led R&D developments of our network optimizer and managed all the technical details of our operations, while he took care of business aspects of the company. The company's archived website features some words about its founders.

Our technology inspired a few (1, 2, 3) academic papers.

The closest thing to a CV I have is my LinkedIn profile.

Education and past occupations

I am self-taugth, never had much patience for schools. After I somehow managed to pass high school, I tried a large spectrum of occupations: I was an electrician, served in the military, repaired bicycles, worked at a technical hotline, ran my own PC repair business, held the position of a cybersecurity instructor and more. Software programming was a distant dream that I pursued mostly during night time, but eventually it became a full time job.

Open-source & politics

I believe in sharing knowledge - be it under the form of ideas, code, designs or any other means of expression. It is the reason why I publish most of my works under an open-source license. This might give the impression that I am some kind of leftist, and that's something I'd rather not be associated with. I am a conservative libertarian at heart, and a fervent capitalist. This does not preclude me from being sympathetic to open-source, albeit I have little regard for the GPL which I consider to be a counterproductive construct. I largely prefer truly free, liberal licenses like BSD, MIT, or public domain works.

Contact

Wanna get in touch? My e-mail address is almost the same as the address of this web page (firstname@lastname.fr).

A surprising number of people have troubles pronouncing my name, so here it is (courtesy of wikimedia).