# coles.codes

> Design. Ship. Scale. — Matt Coles — Principal Engineer at AWS in Melbourne, Australia 🇦🇺. Notes on building Python tools and AI agents, open-source LLMs, homelab, and cloud architecture with AWS CDK.

 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.


## Pages
- [About](https://coles.codes/about/): Matt Coles — Principal Engineer at AWS in Melbourne, Australia 🇦🇺. Python tooling and AI agents, local LLMs, a Docker Swarm homelab, conference talks, and coffee.
- [Friends](https://coles.codes/friends/): Blogs and people Matt Coles rates — hands-on writing on AWS, Python, and AI-assisted coding.
- [Projects](https://coles.codes/projects/): Things Matt Coles has built or is tinkering with: the coles.codes site itself, a Tailscale homelab, and fine-tuning local vision LLMs at home.

## Posts
- [whoami](https://coles.codes/posts/whoami/) — 2026-05-30: Why coles.codes exists — notes on building with LLMs and agents, fine-tuning models at home, AWS architecture, and homelab tinkering.

## Feeds
- [RSS](https://coles.codes/index.xml)
- [Sitemap](https://coles.codes/sitemap.xml)