About Me
Welcome! If we’ve not already met, I’m JP Mattia. I started this blog mainly out of peer pressure, which really means that after writing some posts about restaurants, a couple of commenters wrote “You should write some essays or a memoir”. I’m 100% sure everyone who wrote that now regrets it.
The brief outline of my life: I grew up in southern Connecticut, left to attend MIT in 1982, and didn’t leave until 1996. While that’s not a career path that would suit everybody, it was exactly the right life for me. Along the way, I worked at MIT Lincoln Laboratory for some years, and collected a small pile of degrees. I also collected a wife, Laura, who collected her own pile of MIT degrees.
After some years in commercial R&D (Texas Instruments and Bell Labs), Laura and I set out for the land of startups in Silicon Valley. These days, we run a video delivery business for advertisers, which puts content into 6000+ TV, cable, and digital outlets.
Much of my free time is spent outdoors hiking and generally being healthy, with the hope that I can undo some of the crazy behavior from my youth.
I hope you enjoy the tales herein.
About the blog
Originally, I was mostly dismissive of setting up a blog. As I kept looking at the various options in the current market, I kept getting drawn in. “Oh, I can use ruby? Cool!” “Oh, github will host it? Cool!” Eventually, I broke down and set up this software over the course of a few evenings.
This software is powered by Jekyll, and runs under Github pages. The Jekyll theme is mostly Minimal Mistakes, but there are a bunch of customizations. If you are dying to see those customizations, all is revealed in my Github repo, although you are warned that there are some quick and dirty hacks to get things looking like I want.