Hi 👋, I’m Matthew Carlson

I spent way too much of my life avoiding having to make decisions and priorities. My wife and I have a goal to “do one thing on the house every day”. This usually means fixing baseboard, painting, adjusting cabinet doors, installing new cabinets. It ranges from small to big tasks and looking at the spreadsheet is very overwhelming. So work tends to happen in spurts. At the same time, cleaning and meal planning are two areas where I need to invest the mental effort to keep track of it and plan it out, but just haven’t made a focused effort....

Like many coders, I participated in Advent of Code 2025. However, this year I want to make it challenging. Learning Rust or Elixir are both tempting options, but why not go for something a bit more out there? I want to solve every problem with the GPU not the CPU. Which means a compute shader. I chose to use Swift and Metal as my shader language. Mostly because I was using a Mac and partly because I’ve been meaning to improve my Swift skills as well....

If you’ve been unlucky to converse with someone who has recently bought a bidet, they’ve probably told you how it changed their lives like some sort of newfound religion. As someone who converted to Bidetism recently, I’m here to tell you four reasons why you shouldn’t. Have you ever looked at your toilet and thought it could remind you more of a nursing home? With a bidet, you can. Strap an enormous white plastic throne to your diminutive toilet....

This is a gross oversimplification, but there are roughly two types of music players: classical and jazz. Classical knows what’s coming next. They play as a well-oiled machine that is in tune and sync. They can start and stop on a dime as directed. Jazz flows, bouncing to new places and riffing off the previous stanza. Sometimes beautiful and sometimes verging on horrid, jazz keeps time but not beat. Classical practices specific pieces and jazz practices generally....

While I won’t go so far as to diagnose myself with ADD without consulting a doctor, those who know me know I can be distracted quite easily. So recently, I decided to do something a little different with a personal project I started a few weeks ago (link to come). I wrote unit tests. That may seem rather uninspired, but I’ve always poo-pood the idea of test-driven development (TDD), as it seems wild to me to write a test for something that you don’t know what it needs to do yet....

I find the 20’s to the 50’s a very fascinating time in American history. Perhaps because it is so very different from the life we have today, but still feels relatively closer. Maybe even more so because the 20’s and 30’s were so radically different from just 50 years prior. So in pursuit of learning more about the history of the cinema and to understand more about what life was like by watching what they watched, I’m going to watch the top grossing/most popular movie from each year....

Surveys by Common Sense Media and the Consumer Mobility Report both state a large majority Americans sleep next to their phone or with their phone in hand. According to a 2019 Statista survey , 44% of participants reported feeling some anxiety when separated from their phone (not the same thing as the smartphone itself causing anxiety ). This isn’t a public decrying of how we are hopelessly addicted to our phones....

I have lots of laptops and one desktop. While jumping around the country, it’s annoying to have to setup a dev environment on every machine. There are solutions out there like docker, github codespaces, or renting a VM from one of the dozens of cloud providers. But I already have a great desktop with everything I want already setup. I work on tons of different projects (most don’t see enough work to warrant a writeup) and it’s annoying to have to provision the different environment....

Since I hate sites that make you read a whole story to get the recipes, out of the five different ice creams, here were the two highest ranking ones. I’d recommend reading more about these recipes Silk Ice Cream 1/2 cup granulated sugar 1/4 tsp xantham gum 2 tbsp light corn syrup 1 1/3 cups + 1 tbsp of Silk Heavy Whipping Cream Alternative 1 cup - 1 tbsp of Oat Milk (you can substitute other milks, but do your math to recalculate the fat, see notes below) Combine sugar and xantham gum Put corn syrup in medium pot and stir in oat milk....

I have a friend who claims food delivery is too expensive and would just go and pick it up themselves. To me, if I’m hot and tired from working on some house thing, I love just hitting a button and hopping in the shower knowing some kind soul will deliver food to my door by the time I’m out. Ethical concerns about food delivery companies aside (I try to tip well), it’s something I value more than my friend does....