I'm Norbert Kéri, a self taught web developer/fullstack engineer/growth hacker/cloud architect/whatever trendy buzzword at the moment, living in Oslo, Norway. I learned programming as an autodidact, making a character generator for DnD in Delphi, and then later creating a small community site for a game called DotA in PHP. By 2006, I already had a very good grasp on programming, and after spending one year at the university, I was extremely dissatisfied with its dry, theoretical approach, so I started looking for a job. I was cautioned by everyone not to drop out, but what can I lose? I can always come back.
Turns out it was one the best choices, if not the best choice in my life. I immediately got a job, I started earning practical knowledge, I started earning money, I learned how to be financially responsible, I learned how to navigate office politics, I had zero debt, I had a 3 years headstart on people my age, I moved out, and learned to live on my own, and it allowed me to move to another country. After programming professionally for a few years, nobody has ever questioned me on why I have no degrees.
Now, as of early 2014 2016 2020, I have 4k 6.8k 9.6k 10.2k reputation on StackOverflow, which puts me in the top 9% 5% 4%. I'm also in the top 10% in PHP, Doctrine2, CSS, in the top 20% in MySQL, and top 30% in Symfony2. I have contributed to a few open source projects on GitHub: I have added the ability to specify static methods as constructors for the Alice library (a fixture generator for PHP), and have done a few bug reports for Symfony2 (one of them resulted in an immediate release of a new version), Doctrine2, the r.js compiler, and a few Symfony2 bundles.
The blog
Most of my early knowledge came from various programming blogs, at a point I had more than 50 blogs in my RSS reader, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be where I am, if people wouldn't share their experiences through blogs, slides and talks with the rest of the world. This blog is my way of contributing back to this community.
The other purpose is to put a stark contrast to what the internet was, before it became infected with advertisers and sales. This site has no advertisements, does not use any kind of cookies, it does not track you, it does not serve advertisements, malware, embedded cryptominers, popups, popunders, cookie banners, facebook shares, tweet buttons, or disgusting WE VALUE YOUR PRIVACY popups. It even works 100% without javascript.
I really like the hacker community, and I hope some people will find something useful when googling something, on this site.
The name of the blog comes from a happy little accident. I had to deploy new features to one of our sites, and of course I broke everything. Completely white empty page. I had no access to any kind of logs, the only thing I had was an FTP account. The guy who was the customer contact at the company was already impatient behind me, and of course I had no idea what is wrong, so I told him that I'm just going to restore the old site from a backup.
Me: Yeah, I have no idea what's wrong, I'm just going to restore the old site from a backup
CG: Oh you have a backup?
Me: Of course I have a backup (you think I'm an idiot?)
So, I navigated to my ~/backups folder, and opened the archive, here is the picture of the backup:
Yeah, that was not a good day.
The other blog
I have another blog that deals with computer games, board games, reviews, and the flaming pile of garbage that is called "gaming journalism". You can check that at https://games.ivalice.xyz.
Contact
You can find an email address on my consulting page.