About Me

matt wartell writes software during the day and sentences at night, both with more confidence than is probably warranted.

He has been programming long enough to have watched entire paradigms arrive with great fanfare, achieve dominance, and settle into legacy status—all without the universe noticeably caring. He finds this comforting, mostly.

His essays, collected here under the name flotsam and…, were written between 2005 and 2012. They concern themselves with the usual subjects: why /bin/true is surprisingly interesting if you follow it far enough back through Unix history; what “kk” actually means in a text message and whether the distinction matters (it does); the mechanics of how good people end up defending bad systems; and occasional dispatches from Minecraft, where he spent considerable time failing to punch trees into boards and emerging from the experience with opinions.

He cares about civil liberties the way engineers care about bad error handling—not because it’s glamorous to care, but because he has seen the failure modes. The DMCA, corporate content moderation, and the quiet authority of people following instructions are recurring subjects, approached less as politics and more as systems analysis. Anyone who says the distinction doesn’t matter is itching for a fight.

He is a father. His daughter has, at various points, requested bulk datasets from government agencies for reasons that turned out to make complete sense once explained. He has written about grief in a way that tries not to be maudlin and mostly succeeds. He has volunteered to teach people to code, and he accepts, with the Princess Bride, that life is pain—but considers it evidence of something rather than argument against it.