About
Hey, I’m Matt — a Principal Engineer at AWS, living in Melbourne, Australia 🇦🇺. I build things and write up the bits worth keeping.
Lately, that’s mostly:
- Building tools in Python — Pydantic, PydanticAI, FastAPI, AWS Strands. Big on type safety, with AI agents doing the boring parts and a fair bit of agent orchestration.
- Playing with open-source LLMs — Qwen, GLM and friends, run locally on a Framework Desktop and a DGX Spark. Lately a lot of OCR and vision-model tinkering, just for the fun of it.
- A homelab for my tinkering — Raspberry Pis, an old Synology NAS, some Dell OptiPlexes Micros, and a pile of routers, all stitched together with Tailscale so I can reach them from anywhere, running far too many containers with Docker Swarm and Portainer.
- Currently living in the terminal — Claude Code and Opus daily, Ghostty terminal on the Mac, and endlessly ricing my Linux and Claude Code configs.
- Making apps — Into Flutter lately, after plenty of Swift and React Native. Cloud-backed with AWS CDK; my go-to AWS services are Bedrock, EventBridge, Fargate (ECS), and CDK.
- Talking about it — I speak at user groups and conferences like AWS re:Invent and PyCon AU, make the odd YouTube video, and used to host a stream called Devs in the Shed.
Day to day I ship software, and always trying to think a step ahead: how it’ll scale and the design patterns underneath. For backends that’s usually a FastAPI modular monolith to start, breaking into microservices only where something genuinely needs to scale. Helps me keep things simple first, with room to grow later.
This blog is where i post about my experiments that i think are worth sharing.
Outside work I’m usually reading or gaming, at home with my wife and our cats. There’s nearly always a coffee within reach, I take my coffee pretty seriously, and a good number of the posts here started as a half-formed idea over coffee!
Opinions here are my own, not my employer’s.