Index

Hey there!

I'm Steve Gattuso, a consultant specializing in architecting and building applications to help grow your business.

I have 11 years of of experience with a variety of web and mobile technologies, building applications as both a hobby and a career. I've also worked with many companies and individual clients to build anything ranging from an ecommerce website to an automated email classification system. You can find more details of the projects I've been a part of here and by visiting my GitHub profile.

For an amusing introduction, here's a gif of me getting hit by a balloon in slow motion

Recent Posts

→ The Future of Education is Plain Text

I totally agree with this article, but I think we should expand this far past education. Anyone who doesn’t own a copy of Microsoft Word knows just how frustrating it is to receive a .docx file from someone. The file opens in some alternative office suite (for me, Pages) and you’re immediately presented with a list of incompatibilities, as your word processor doesn’t support some archaic edge-cases in the docx spec.

Plaintext/Markdown documents make life much simpler. No incompatibilities, no expensive and proprietary software getting in the way, just content in the simplest possible format. It’s future proof and easily accessible to just about any device on the planet. Hell, even .pdf files are better than sending a .docx or .ppt.

June 13, 2017
→ Neuralink and the Brain's Magical Future

I’ve once again walked away from a Tim Urban article with a completely different perspective on what humanity’s future could turn out to be: this time with Elon Musk’s desire to merge human brains and computers.

One thing I wish he’d have touched on more is just how scary an effective brain-machine interface would be. If you think privacy advocates are being paranoid at abuses with today’s level of technology, think of where we’ll be if machinery is tied in with our actual brain. Imagine if advertising companies could get access to granular neural responses to their marketing campaigns. Or know how much you’re thinking about their brand on a daily basis before and after seeing a particular advertisement. What if tv shows and movies could be free, so long as you opt-in to allowing advertisers access to your thoughts while watching? This list could go on for a while, but you get the idea.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m super excited about the potential gains we’d see as a species from having an advanced BMI, and Urban even mentions that these scary feelings always happen with new technologies that people don’t understand. That being said, the idea of humanity having that level of access to each other’s brains is fucking terrifying; a bit moreso than “these kids are staring at their phones all day , the world is going down the crapper!” I’m just worried that our lack of ability to properly manage ethics with today’s level of technology is only going to be amplified as we continue to progress, especially once we get further down the path of BMIs.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t invent the magic wizard hat, simply that we need to tread very carefully.

April 22, 2017
→ Privacy is Power

I really like the way this article articulates why putting effort into digital privacy is worth our time. Recently I’ve been moving myself away from cloud services in favor of self-hosted open-source projects. I’ve switched from using GitHub to Gogs, Evernote to vimwiki, GitHub pages to my own web server (deployed by Jenkins), encrypted backups using borgbackup, and Dropbox to Syncthing.

It’s been a lot of fun building this self-hosted network of services, but it’s also important to recognize my privilege in being able to do so. Not everyone has the time, motivation, and skill-set to replace the various cloud services that may be snooping on their lives. Even more concerning is the general population’s lack of interest in protecting privacy; I all too frequently hear friends and family use the argument “I have nothing to hide, so why should inconvenience myself?”

I think there is a lot of untapped potential in creating open-source, encrypted, and decentralized software that is more accessible to the masses. A combination of privacy education and easy-to-use software could be a potent force against government and corporate snooping. It’s obviously much easier said than done, but I think it’s an important battle to continue fighting nonetheless.

Quick plug: the EFF is fighting this exact battle. If you’re interested in helping the cause and are financially able, please consider donating!

February 07, 2017

If you're interested in staying up to date with what I'm up to, subscribe via RSS or follow me on Twitter.