About

Hi — I’m Matt.

My first career was actually in biology. I spent about five years doing pre-clinical and drug metabolism work at a biotech company. Somewhere along the way I started using VBA to automate the data analysis, got more interested in the automation than the data, went back for a CS degree, and made the switch. That was close to two decades ago now. But the biology never really left — I still think about software the way I used to think about living systems. How small things compound. How health builds or erodes quietly. How the best systems aren’t the most optimized ones, they’re the ones that can still adapt when things change.

These days most of my work is in frontend systems — design systems, component architectures, the shared infrastructure that sits underneath the features. I like working on the layer that other people build on top of. The primitives, the patterns, the constraints that make things easier or harder for everyone downstream. When that layer is healthy, nobody thinks about it. That’s how you know it’s working.

This site is where I think out loud. I write about how frontend architecture evolves, what AI is doing to the craft of building software, and how technology and culture shape each other in ways we don’t always notice. I also write about martial arts, life, food, and whatever I’m trying to figure out at the time. I don’t have a theme so much as a habit of pulling on threads until something connects.

What I’m thinking about lately:

• What AI tools are doing to the day-to-day shape of engineering work — not just making it faster, but changing what the work actually is
• How to build frontend architecture that holds up across teams, years, and the inevitable framework shift
• The difference between systems built for convenience and systems built to last
• Whether biology is actually a good model for how software evolves, or whether I just want it to be — I think it is, but I’m still working on it

Outside of work I live in Ventura County with my family. I snowboard when there’s snow, get outside when there isn’t, and I’ve spent more weekends than I can count sitting in a gym watching my kid play volleyball. I also hold a black belt in To-Shin Do — which, honestly, taught me more about patience and beginner’s mind than any zen or engineering book I’ve read over the years.

My goal is pretty simple: build teams and systems that stay useful and understandable long after the initial excitement wears off, and leave them better than I found them.