about this blog icon

Hello there and welcome to my blog!

I got the catonmat.net domain two years ago but couldn't get myself to setup blogging software and launch it. But today I sat down and did it, and it feels great.

How do you like the name? Cat-on-mat. I picked a name that has two short words that rhyme – cat-mat – and that is easy to remember. The result – cat-on-mat.

So why did I start this blog and what am I going to write here?

First of all let me quickly introduce myself.

My name is Peter and I really like computers and programming. I've never studied computer science but instead learned everything on my own by experimenting, tinkering, and trying things. I first got access to computers at age of 6 I instantly got hooked.

I like to explore Unix tools and make them do things they're not supposed to do. For example, I was recently learning Awk programming language and at the same time I was watching YouTube videos. I thought, wouldn't it be cool do make Awk download YouTube videos? A quick Google search for awk networking revealed that GNU version of Awk supports networking. After a couple of hours of tinkering I got Awk to download videos. Super neat! That's something I'll write about soon.

Edit: I just wrote about it! Here's the post – Downloading YouTube Videos with Gawk.

I also like to make programming cheat sheets. I have at least 30 on my desk right now – CSS cheat sheet, HTML cheat sheet, MySQL cheat sheet, Perl predefined variables cheat sheet, C and C++ operator precedence cheat sheet, and many others. About 15 of these I've created myself. I found that they help me speed up the learning process when I've a concise language reference a glance away. I'll publish my cheat sheets here as well.

Edit: Here's the first post about cheat sheets – Awk Cheat Sheet.

Other topics that I'll write about are various tutorials about how to get things done, reviews of Google tech talks and other video lectures, and computer trivia.

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I'll also be creating many interesting software projects and open sourcing them.

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Stay tuned for more awesomeness and see you soon!