Mathias Meyer
Who is Mathias Meyer?
A dabbler, a generalist, a jack of all trades, a master of none, a verbose tweeter the Switzerland of NoSQL, but most importantly, he’s working at a small company called Peritor in Berlin, Germany, where he makes the clouds and infrastructure do his bidding, spending most of his time working on and improving Scalarium, our cloud hosting platform. I also occasionally blog about things that are on my mind. Over the last year or so, that’s been mostly databases and infrastructure.
Where and when did you start programming?
I looked at my first lines of Basic and later Pascal code around the age of 11, but have no recollection of actually typing anything. I grew up in Eastern Germany, and we had these weird computers. In hindsight I was incredibly lucky to have two different ones, but at the time I just didn’t feel an urge to tell them what to do.
That didn’t happen until around 1998, when I started studying computer science. Well, not even really computer science, I started out as someone wanting to do multimedia and stuff, but ended up finding a love for C++ (believe it or not) and databases. The latter is haunting me to this very day.
You favorite language? and why?
For a long time I would’ve said Ruby, but these days I’m more and more leaning towards other languages, and I’m starting to feel that I need to look elsewhere for some purposes. That should be obvious, but I guess I’ve just stuck around Ruby for too long to really take it for granted that it should not just be one language. I try to find beauty in any language, though I’ve given up on PHP for that, and even though most people hate it, I still have a certain fondness for C++. Odd, right?
To a certain extent Ruby is already way too much in terms of features of what I already need, and I’ve grown wary of some of its oddities. I like to keep my code as simple as possible, without magic, and could live without a lot of the luxuries Ruby offers and with more of things it doesn’t offer.
Current language curiosities include Erlang, CoffeeScript, Clojure and Python, for different reasons obviously, though they all have this functional programming knack to them, in which I’m getting more and more interested.
What does your typical day look like?
As I’m well known to be a coffee geek, it starts with a good cup of coffee. It’s become a ritual, and I cherish it. It’s not about the caffeine, it’s not about needing coffee, it’s about sitting down with a nice cup of beautiful coffee and about not starting the day too hectic.
I have given up on trying to stay organized in projects and lots of specific task. I work on what needs to be done, we also do consulting on the side, we help customers move their applications to the cloud and automate their infrastructure. Sometimes I work from home, or visit and talk to customers, or go to local coworking spaces to network, meet and work with friends.
I don’t have a fixed daily agenda, and I like it that way. Coffee and taking my daughter to the kindergarten are the only fixed points. I liked that when I did freelance work, and I like having that freedom now. Of course there’s certain responsibilities to our customers and clients involved, but I’d say they leave lots of room for flexibility.
As we’re a small company (four people at the moment), everyone pretty much does everything. But some days I just hide in a corner or at home to get something done, thankfully I still have these moments.
Having a daughter shortens the working day quite considerably, so I’m keen on getting the most out of it. That doesn’t necessarily mean I need to be full on for seven or eight hours, but that I can go home feeling like I’ve improved on something today, moved something forward.
What do you do in your free time?
I do a lot of my writing in my free time, but also more coding, and dig into technologies outside my daily work, or only remotely related, and play with databases. For one, it’s play time. I work on things that I feel like working on, that may or may not include things that are related to our work. Our business is bootstrapped, so it doesn’t hurt to do a bit more at home, but I try not to overdo it. Playing and dabbling with things gives me a strange feeling of freedom.
One of the good things about having a kid is that it forces you away from the computer, forces you to live in the moment with it, to experience what my daughter experiences. I love that more than anything.
But before I get too sentimental, aside from being a coffee geek and simply just a geek, I’m somewhat of a photo geek. I collect and use film cameras. I have a special knack for medium format cameras like the Holga, a cheap piece of plastic posing as a camera. Analog photography beautifully contradicts my daily work, so it’s a nice medium to focus a different stream of creativity on, to get new inspirations, to find beauty in ordinary and every day things.
Sheesh, there I go again.
Current favorite apps?
I’ve drastically reduced and simplified my tool set over the last years. I use (Mac)Vim, git and a shell for my every day work. Everything that can’t be done in a text editor or a shell is not work, it’s wasted time. I use Notational Velocity for taking notes and writing bits of text, preparing blog posts and whatnot. Apart from that I’m prone to all the popular distractions like Skype, Campfire, Adium, Twitter, you name it.
What OS do you prefer?
Been working on a Mac for over seven years now. Wouldn’t have it any other way.
Small picture for your Workplace?
This is my part time workplace, and believe me, it looks a lot more interesting than my desk which has just a laptop and a display standing on it.
Name something that has inspired you recently?
Aside from photography and looking at what other people take pictures of, I find inspiration in the people in the communities I dabble in. There are so many smart folks out there who enjoy sharing their knowledge and talking about things that may sound mundane to them already, but that are simply fascinating to me.
I’m very grateful to be able to learn from them and improve on my own ways of thinking, interacting and coding. I’ve met so many people through 2010, and they were all incredibly open and so very willing to share their knowledge. I bow to you!
Last but not least, go grab a tissue again, my daughter. Not because I can talk to her about distributed systems, Erlang or B-trees, which I probably could anyway, but because she forces me to take time off, to get away from the computer. I started to get my best ideas when I was out and about with her.
What do you prefer (and why)? Freelance work or full time employment?
I’ve done both, and now I’m somewhat in the middle, as I’m running my own business together with two partners. I think I prefer full time employment when it involves working on your own product, something people pay for using. That’s just incredible, and every day I’m working on it, I could not enjoy it more. It doesn’t come without troubles, especially when you’re responsible for all kinds of parts of the application, but it’s totally worth it.
But if working full time would just be working for the man, it’s freelance work, hands down.
What are your personal projects and goals for 2011?
I want to learn Erlang, and build something with it, maybe even use it on Scalarium, where and i it makes sense. I want to take more photos again, it’s just too much fun, and I let that hobby down quite considerably in 2010. I want to read more, books on founders, on business, marketing, all that stuff that sounded boring to me years ago, suddenly has an unexpected fascination to me.
Last but not least, more time outside, more time with friends, more time with family.
