- BIO

Matt Stancliff

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe."

Matt

Technology Life Highlights

Hosted Dial-Up BBS

1996 - 1999

First Domain Name Purchase

1997

Computer Science BSCS with OS/Networking & Econ & Linguistics Focus Areas

Georgia Tech

2001 - 2004

First OSS Contribution

Contributed small patch to Heartbeat

2006

First In-Memory DB Work

Database Engines under Erlang, historical reference

2007

Helped found Hacker Dojo

Co-signer on building lease, helped with events and buildouts

2009

Improved Web Security

The entire industry was sleeping on what SSL ciphers and DHE params meant for both security and performance. My benchmarks 'went viral' for showing performance differences between cipher suites and DHE parameters and even caused some high profile projects to fix their code for not loading DH params properly historical summary a, historical summary b

2011

Contributor to Redis

Refactored many components for security and performance while building new features focusing on stability and efficiency and community management

2014

Designed & Built a Redis Replacement

After Redis decided to go in a less open and less community focused direction, I spent a couple years building the most memory efficient database possible. End result is the highest performing in-memory database in the world with over 8,000 hours of development on top of a lifetime of working in high performance distributed systems experience, yet nobody really wants to buy it when free worse performing choies exist.

2016-2020

Building Computational Consciousness Actors

Growing non-consensus AI projects with higher ROI than dumping terabytes of data into segmented text writing platforms.

2024

Employment Vibes

Local Computer Repair Shop

Tech / Sales

Atlanta, GA

2000 - 2001

Campus Computer Store

Sales

Atlanta, GA

2001

Regional ISP

Network Engineer / Infrastructure / Platform / Automation / Observability / Data Center Management

Atlanta, GA

2003 - 2005

SMS Aggregator

Infrastructure / Data Center Admin

Atlanta, GA

2005 - 2006

Network Security Company

Linux Net Kernel Module Dev

Atlanta, GA

2006 - 2007

Social Network Company

Infrastructure / Network / Platform / Automation / Observability / Data Center Admin

San Jose, CA

2008 - 2012

Open Source Project Travel Break

UK, Spain, Ireland, Costa Rica, US

2012 - 2013

Redis Dev and Sales and Consulting Support

Sales Eng / Dev / Consulting / Support / Community Management

New York, NY

2013 - 2016

Open Source Project Travel Break

Vietnam, Bali, NZ, Japan, US

2016 - 2021

Hiring Data Platform

Product Dev / Infrastructure / Network / Security / SOC2 / Admin

Los Angeles, CA

2021 - 2023

Community Open Source Work (unpaid) / Waiting for AI Apocalypse (unpaid) / Available for Employment

🫠

Los Angeles, CA

2024+

Experience

(timeframes are dated from first productive practical experience; inquire for more specifics if curious)

These are notable experience snapshots, but the goal is never individual tool usage, but rather how to combine a wide lifetime of experience across multiple disciplines into building high performance and cost-optimized services, products, teams, and companies (while keeping everything easy to understand and simple to expand over time).

These are the tools and practical experience we use to help build products and services as efficiently as possible.

platform automation

terraform

(3+ years)

puppet / facter -> ansible

(14+ years)

ssh

(23+ years)

telnet / netcat

(27+ years)

custom pull/fetch deployment systems

(16+ years)

IPN / webhooks

(15+ years)

automating distributed TLS ACME cert renewal securely

(7+ years)

observability automation

grafana

(3+ years)

prometheus / victoria metrics

(3+ years)

legacy nagios / cacti / rrdtool / mrtg / custom dashboards

(21+ years)

service health check / supervision / smf hierarchies for automatic restarts

(20+ years)

time-series analysis, trending, and anomaly detection methods (holt-winters, ARIMA, modern transformers)

(18+ years)

Python

python 2.x

(16+ years)

python 3.x

(9+ years)

async / coroutines / concurrency

(5+ years)

dataclasses

(4+ years)

poetry

(4+ years)

fastapi / pydantic

(5+ years)

django

(14+ years)

pandas

(8+ years)

matplotlib

(12+ years)

C

C89 / C99

(22+ years)

C11

(11+ years)

clang-format / clang-tidy

(8+ years)

Make

(22+ years)

cmake

(15+ years)

pthreads

(21+ years)

epoll / kqueue / libuv / event-loop concurrency

(14+ years)

network APIs / BSD sockets

(21+ years)

godbolt

(10+ years)

esoteric languages

erlang

(18+ years)

scheme / lisp

(23+ years)

javascript / ecmascript

(17+ years)

css

(25+ years)

unicode

(10+ years)

smalltalk / squeak

(21+ years)

objective c

(19+ years)

swift

(9+ years)

product development

internal tools platforms

(21+ years)

customer-facing application security and usability and design

(22+ years)

instrumenting applications with observability hooks

(18+ years)

building for long-term platform sustainability and maintainability

(18+ years)

productivity

tcsh -> bash -> zsh

(27+ years)

vi -> vim -> nvim

(22+ years)

screen -> tmux

(21+ years)

perl (rip)

(27+ years)

git

(16+ years)

legacy cvs -> svn -> hg

(21+ years)

rsync

(21+ years)

services

nginx

(15+ years)

apache (2) / mod_* / cgi-bin (rip)

(27+ years)

postfix / dovecot

(16+ years)

dns hosting (bind / powerdns / djbdns)

(20+ years)

hosted dns (dnsmadeeasy / route53 / et al)

(15+ years)

modern payment API automation (stripe, etc)

(13+ years)

software firewalls and IP networking internals (ipchains / iptables / nftables / pf / crossbar / security groups / ACLs)

(20+ years)

virtualization/isolation tradeoffs (VMs vs cgroups vs zones vs chroot vs containers)

(15+ years)

databases
(usage and optimization/reliability)

mysql (onprem / self-hosted)

(23+ years)

mysql (rds / aurora serverless v2)

(2+ years)

postgres

(21+ years)

sqlite

(14+ years)

clickhouse (self-hosted) / clickhouse cloud

(3+ years)

legacy berkelydb (bdb)

(22+ years)

custom developed databases

(18+ years)

legacy tech business things: RADIUS, Asterisk, voip provisioning automation, proxcard provisioning automation, captive portal automation

(20+ years)

scalability / performance

network design and management (subnets / VLANs / VPCs / zones / regions / routing)

(23+ years)

server management via iLO / IPMI / serial

(21+ years)

distributed processing

(19+ years)

AWS basics (S3, EC2, SQS)

(18+ years)

AWS intermediates (IAM, billing optimization, redundancy, spot optimizations)

(9+ years)

AWS advanced (VPC, bridging VPCs via non-overlapping subnets, ALB vs NLB vs CloudMap vs App Mesh, code build/deploy/artifact, eventbridge, cloudtrail)

(3+ years)

AWS automation using boto3

(14+ years)

websockets

(4+ years)

pubsub architectures

(15+ years)

queue architectures / topic subscription modeling

(15+ years)

sales engineering

tech authority in sales calls

(10+ years)

customize features for custom customers

(9+ years)

training other sales and support persons about technical products

(9+ years)

Linux

networking / kernel / file systems / architecture / security / scalability

(21+ years)

drbd

(15+ years)

also various combinations Linux / FreeBSD / OpenBSD / Solaris / macOS

(25+ years)

the old ways: init.d, crond, ntpd, supervisord, netstat, ifconfig, iptables

(21+ years)

the new ways: systemd, ip, ss, nft

(9+ years)

cross-platform multi-host roaming logins via ldap / pam / nsswitch / kerberos / nfs

(19+ years)

Design

is the design easy to use? is it easy to understand? does it look nice? is the color scheme effective? does it follow usability principles? does your grid layout work? is interactive latency acceptable?

(21+ years)

Modern AI

pytorch; transformers, more than meets the TPU

(2+ years)

einops

(2+ years)

creating custom decoder-only transformer architectures in pytorch

(2+ years)

clean reusable training with LightningCLI

(2+ years)

deploying model snapshots into live environments

(2+ years)

using openai APIs for GPT assistant output generation

(2+ years)

ML

everybody loves a good maximally separating hyperplane

(20+ years)

luatorch (rip)

(15+ years)

LBP window extractions

(15+ years)

opencv

(18+ years)

numpy

(17+ years)

scikit-learn

(14+ years)

general image model usage / detectron2 / etc

(5+ years)

futurism

we are constantly living in the future and it keeps getting more future the longer we future

(20+ years)

Notable Writings

imagine if somebody did this

imagine if somebody did this

Published on: October 30, 2012

just me having clearly unreasonable ideas in 2012 nobody would ever pursue or explore further (record scratch—oh, you mean it's now over 10 years later and implementing these ideas in dozens of companies is now a global $100 trillion industry? go figure.)

a fly on the wall

a fly on the wall

Published on: July 18, 2014

again more of my clearly unreasonable ideas. look at this weirdo over here thinking 'A.I.' is going to be a big deal. what a waste of time! nobody should listen to this person anymore.
I also talked to multiple VCs in 2014 (thanks to intros from Sam) about funding a GPU-accelerated database platform to grow AI learning capabilities, but all the VCs cared about at the time was 'so does it do blockchain? no? no blockchain? no blockchain no funding.'

what is a feeling?

what is a feeling?

Published on: October 11, 2011

some historical random musings on what may encode information overlays into our experiences (such as how we can have the same information under different emotional contexts; the information doesn't change, but our 'experience' of the information changes, etc)

how to c

Published on: January 7, 2016

An overview of (at the time) more modern C usage. It was fairly popular and got over 200,000 readers the first week and was translated into multiple languages.

so you think you can const

Published on: April 11, 2016

A follow-up to the initial C guide which goes into more detail across a wide variety of scenarios with complete concrete examples.

CRCspeed

Published on: December 22, 2014

CRCspeed was the result of a year's worth of on-and-off work to track down how to accelerate legacy CRC calculations. The results of my research have been included in multiple high profile widely used products and services.

Journal

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Abstract

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Research

Research Summary

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Interests

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