I registered stackdump.com on November 2, 2001, while I was still in college — a computer science student running a web server out of my apartment over a DSL modem. I had just learned PHP, so I built a small site where my friends and I could post to each other. It wasn’t much, but it felt alive — a tiny social space made from code.
From those early experiments on the frontier of the web, I moved into game development, then into the broader world of networked systems — places where code and people intersect at scale. Somewhere along the way, I discovered Bitcoin, missed the mining wave by buying a PlayStation 3 instead of a GPU, and later found myself at an Ethereum meetup in La Jolla, realizing that blockchains were more than money — they were programmable systems of flow.
Over time, my focus shifted from building applications to understanding how systems behave. That’s where Petri nets entered the picture — not just as diagrams for state transitions, but as a universal language for modeling causality, concurrency, and composition.
Today, I’m drawn to immutable structures — systems that can explain themselves, verify their own behavior, and persist beyond any one runtime.
Stackdump is where I explore those ideas: how Petri nets and category theory can shape the next generation of software, blockchains, and systems that think in flows instead of functions.
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Matt York Petri-net maximalist