Synacor Desk Swag

While cleaning things I happen to cross a pile of papers and sticky notes containing random phrases and interesting comments from coworkers at a previous job I used to work. I felt the need to get these digitized and memorialized as soon as the wave of nostalgia hit.

As an initial prerequisite to reading/seeing this data: I was called “Sparky”, a name provided to me by David Molik shortly after I was employed. The reasoning was simple: There’s just too many “Matts” in an office building of 300 professionals to verbally discern me from the rest, so a moniker was appropriate. It stuck for a decade, and was much better than my previous moniker “Crash.”

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Hard Mode

The online MMORPG “World of Warcraft” is currently in it’s 12th expansion “Midnight”, and it’s 2nd “Race for World First” for their raid “The Venomous Abyss”. As of this writing the top 3 Guilds are all 6/8 of the Mythic Difficulty at the second week, with the penultimate boss causing them the intended difficulty with their paid-for gear and 317 item levels.

“Back in the days”, meaning between 2013 and 2014 I participated in WoW’s 5th expansions “Mists of Pandaria”s final raid “Siege of Orgrimmar”. As a guild we had cleared many raids, and a majority of raiders decided to continue to the hardest content that was available at the time: Heroic. Unlike current hardcore guilds that take them weeks our journey took almost a year of pain, money, and more pain.

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Synacor Together 2020 Yearbook

During COVID I worked remotely as a Software Engineer for Synacor. Their work-from-home mandate started March 13, 2020 and lasted for ~715 days. After 6 months upper management decided to create a gem of comradery to remind us that, in times of turmoil and confusion, we have always been a team.

I finally got around to physically deleting the hard binding and getting the 8″x11″ yearbook completely digitized and OCR’d.

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