coles.codes

About

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The morning coffee, my first priority!

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.

Friends

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A few blogs and people worth your time.

Paul Kukiel — a good friend of mine, and one of the best Solution Architects I know. He writes hands-on posts on AWS, Python, and AI-assisted coding. Worth a read.

Know each other and want a link here? Give me a shout.

Projects

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A few things I’ve built or am tinkering with. More will land here as they hold up.

coles.codes

My blog (this site). Used Hugo with my own theme, hosted on S3 behind CloudFront, deployed by GitHub Actions, and provisioned with AWS CDK (Python). The source codes public if you want to take a look: MattJColes/colescodes.

The homelab

A few Raspberry Pis, a NAS, a Framework Desktop, a DGX Spark, some Dell OptiPlexes, and more routers than I need. It all runs on Tailscale so I can get to it from anywhere, and there are a lot of containers going at any time. I use it to self-host things, and run local AI.

whoami

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Hello, world.

I’m Matt, a Principal Engineer at AWS here in Melbourne, Australia 🇦🇺. This blog is where I write up the work that’s held up.

Most of my time goes on Python tooling and AI agents, fine-tuning open-source vision models like Qwen on a Framework Desktop, and a homelab I keep finding reasons to expand. At work and at home I build on AWS, mostly with CDK. When something actually works, I try to write up how and why it did.